How cool is your mobile computer?

By cool, I mean temperature? If you're using a cooling fan, then I bet your hard drive temperature isn't going above 95-98 degrees (Fahrenheit). Without an external cooling pad, you may see this temperature exceed 150 degrees and your hard drive may start having problems over time. Some laptops spontaneously shut down if things start to overheat.

The old Pentium 4 processors found in older laptops were known to cause a significant amount of heat. As a result, notebooks that used this processor had really loud fans that were spinning all the time. Newer laptops use cooler processors, so not a large source of heat becomes the hard drive. As prices on SSDs continue to fall, this will probably replace spinning hard drives on mobile computers.

To monitor the temperatures on your mobile computer, I use SpeedFan. This is a free utility and there are many others out there that are free. HD Tune is another one.