Tales from a web developer

I do web development locally. I have a rather powerful computer, dual core 2.5Ghz processor and 4GB of RAM. The problem is… my computer is a laptop. As such, it can suffer from overheating problems.

Last night, I decided I wanted to test to ensure a mass user mail feature worked as expected. The following exchange occurred on IRC:

kathleen: on the manage blocked users page…. hitting mail only mails the visible users, right?
hefox: yeah, it passes in the UIDS
hefox: may want to quickly test that on your testing environment
kathleen: ok, testing
kathleen: it takes awhile
hefox: xd
kathleen: damn
kathleen: my CPU is maxed
hefox: XD
* kathleen has quit (Read error: 104 (Connection reset by peer))
benjamin: oop… apparently she really meant it….
* pkw has joined
pkw: Hi guys.
pkw: hefox: Ms. Murtagh’s computer overheated and shut down from the process.
hefox: XD
hefox: that’s a new.. issue..
pkw: She’s going to wait for her computer to cool down before coming back.

Crazy! I have a CPU graph on my taskbar and I saw it going crazy, then noticed my fan revved up loudly. I opened up the detailed reports, and my CPU and memory were maxed out. About 5 seconds later, my computer shut down.

I promptly fell to the floor laughing hysterically.

My computer has overheated and shut down only one other time: When I was playing City of Heroes for the first time on this laptop. Luckily, letting a big floor fan blow on my laptop solves the overheating problems.