Thought I'd share this...

I've been fed up by my P4 2.6 GHz laptop for a while, which was often running more than half of the time at half speed, because of overheating.
Yesterday, I used a somewhat brutal way to cleaning: air under pressure at one end of the cooling system, vacuum cleaner at the other end.

The result is amazing: not only it makes much less noise, but also I haven't heard (yes, it emits a special noise when the processor works at half speed) it overheating despite it working several hours on WCG @~100% processor time.
It even spent a significant part of the night idle, after finishing both WUs it still had to crunch (thanks to UDMon). I had never seen a WU crunched that fast (~3 hours), although it crunched ~180 (many failed sooner or later, that's why I have less than this in my profile). I recently decreased the number of slots from 6 to 4, since I now have Internet access all days in the week, but I won't go further.


If you want to squeeze out a bit more performance, you can try "passive watercooling" on your laptops, if that applies. I'm using very wet kitchen paper on the bottom end of the laptop, where the heat is maximal and there's no electrical shock hazard. Water evaporation takes up lots of heat.