u/Sensitive_Split_6919

In the kmage is my return piston which is not returning, thus keeping the ebrake actuated. I recently took out the brake pads to check them as I changed the front ons, but just put them back after because they were good. Thebrakes worked fine but after pulling ebrake the rear left is stuck on. I found the issue is this, rather than the return spring, and wanted to check with anybody to make sure if it should look like that andif not how to fix it

I have an SEL 2012 focus that I was doing maintenance on with the brakes. I checked the rear brakes and saw they were good, but unfortunately did not tighten the tire enough. As a result, after a few times driving there was a knocking sound. To identify this I lifted it on ramps and cranked the ebrake to see under the car. I didnt see anything but then had trouble moving it off the ramps. After getting it off them i realized only one rear tire would turn. After lifting it again but with a jack, I realized the sound was the tire, but have yet to be able to unactuate the ebrake on that side.

There were no prior issues, and thenonly thing I did to the brakes, as they still had tread, was add lube to according places. The only thing out of the ordinary was the cap of the pictures valve literally crusted off. Any ideas?

I did an in depth test of the advantages of thermal pads in this post here, with the orientation of the thermal pads on my x240 being shown in the last picture attached to this post. I then ran tests on the the system with no thermal pads (NoThermalPad), thermal pads in those 3 positions (ThermalPad), then I removed the thermal pads on the cpu and left the 2 positioned on the fan assembly and exhaust (ThermalPad2). Lastly, I replaced the paste and ran the orientation with the 2 positioned again (ThermalPad3) because when I replaced the paste earlier in the week, I got bad consistency on the paste (Make sure your paste is pasty and not liquid).

It shows the pad on the cpu to be a hindrance to performance metrics. This is, in my opinion, due to preventing airflow from the fan to travel through the chassis, indirectly cooling other components, including the start of the heat pipe, along with the exit post. Just some advice for other people that wish to look for a place to put thermal pads, the exit fan and exhaust sections are best because not only do they not obstruct airflow (and even act as a seal for unwanted inflow), but wouldn't be a problem of getting hot near it because you probably wouldn't want anything near the exhaust to begin with.

GOAL

The goal of these tests is to test the effectiveness of thermal pad placement to use bottom panel (magnesium alloy) as a heat sink. This is especially useful for aged technology, as being that they are limited in compute power, we can increase battery life, machine lifespan, maintenance intervals, and overall performance by solving thermal issues that may arise. With recent budget models, primarily the Macbook Neo, the importance of thermal regulation has become more clear, as small form factors impose limitations on already compute-constrained devices. Make note, however, that using the bottom panel as a heat sink does make it hotter to the touch (obviously), however I find it funny that somebody would simultaneously be thinking of thermal modifications, while also running throttling-level tasks with the laptop on one's lap.

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SPECS

CPU: i7-4600u

Memory: 8gb ddr3l

Storage: 128gb 2242 sata nvme (main boot drive), 1tb 7200rpm 2.5" hdd (auxilary drive/storage)

OS/WM: i3wm CachyOS

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SETUP

The placement of the thermal pads are shown in the first image.

The selected tasks were completed on the laptop once an equilibrium temperature was reached, and as many metrics were held in constancy, including the surface upon which the laptop sat on, the disabled wi-fi/bluetooth capabilities from bios, screen brightness, volume, and ambient temperatures. The scripts ran to complete these tests were identical to the Diagnostic.sh script in the following repository,https://github.com/bpannanymous/BeckCLI , but used different plot python scripts to plot more data simultaneously (lmk if you want the plot scripts).

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TESTS

Fate - Running "Fate Reawakened" using Wine compatibility layer. Around 80% cpu usage

NFS - Running "Need For Speed: Most Wanted 5.1.0" using PPSSPP emulator. Around 18% cpu usage

AirGear - Watching "Air Gear" Episode 21 in vlc. Less than 10% cpu usage

Loop - Running a simple python loop iteratively that adds up all positive integers up, beginning at one, until a specified number (in this case that being 1,234,567,890 to ensure the loop didn't end before data logging was completed). Around 75% cpu usage

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GEEKBENCH 7 BENCHMARKS

w/o Thermal Pads on Battery - 1041 Single-Core, 1780 Multi-Core

w/o Thermal Pads on AC - 1040 Single-Core, 1774 Multi-Core

w/ Thermal Pads on Battery - 1035 Single-Core, 1667 Multi-Core

w/ Thermal Pads on AC - 1031 Single-Core, 1779 Multi-Core
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RESULTS

There are favorable results as to the ability of thermal pads to effectively dissipate heat through the bottom case, with significant results being observed in all tests, especially in the Fate test, where average temperatures differed by 8F degrees. Even in the case of Air Gear, where temperatures are lesser on average for the sample without the thermal pad, we see from the fan plot, that the temperature actually was low enough to enable the fan to stop working periodically without drastically increasing temperatures. There is no noticeable distinction in the ram usage, nor the fluctuation that is undergone over the course of the tests, as should be expected to some degree, being that RAM is not normally concerned with CPU temperatures in the moderate case. Lastly, power consumption is consistently lower on average for the tests that incorporate a thermal pad, though this impact is negligible, of the order of tens of milliwatts. I would argue this is most due to the lessened load on the fans, as the average fan speeds are also lesser.

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INSIGHTS

Incorporating does significantly decrease strain on the system in terms of temperature peaks and averages, as well as decreases load imposed on auxiliary metrics as power consumption through decreasing fan utilization

The script ran to log the data could have an impact on the lower-strain test data (AirGear and NFS)

The theory regarding the modification is applicable to other laptop constructions and can thus be assumed to have similar results on them, obviously dependent on thermal pad placement and already existent hardware

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FUTURE

Test irregular/sporadic loads to find how thermals act in stress regimes intermediate of the tests imposed through these trials

Examine other thermal pad placements to maximize heat dissipation w/o obstructing ambient airflow for passive cooling

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QUESTIONS

I have not been able to rectify the issue with the Geekbench scores pointing towards the fact that it performs better on battery and w/o thermal pads, than on AC or w/ thermal pads. This is something I will leave open to the community to give their best guess. I would like to note that all tests other than the test on battery w/o thermal pads were ran using the performance powerprofilectl designation, while the outlier was in the power-saver mode, which makes it make even less sense. All of the plotted tests were done in power-saver mode.

If there are any other benchmarking scripts people have that would induce throttling, please send them my way, as none of my loads were significant enough to max out cpu usage, nor cause throttling. It is in this thermal regime that I would like to optimize most.

SPECS

CPU: i7-4600u

Memory: 8gb ddr3l

Storage: 128gb 2242 sata nvme (main boot drive), 1tb 7200rpm 2.5" hdd (auxilary drive/storage)

OS/WM: i3wm CachyOS

MAINTENANCE / UPGRADES

Full chassis swap

72wh External Battery (56.16wh capacity because it was second-hand)

Repasted CPU

Thermal pads directly above CPU on heat pipe and on fan

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5 PROS

Very Modular (Hot-swappable batteries, Wi-Fi card, batteries, ssd/hdd, display

Ports (2x USB 3.0, SD)

Small form factor (12.5")

Works well under moderate load

Multiple storage media support

5 CONS

Some expensive upgrades (1080p Screen (~$100))

Weak chassis linkages to latch to bottom case (easy to break)

Relatively loud fans

Touchpad (I personally like it, but I can see why it can be disliked)

Lid surface finish (Grippy material that retains fingerprint marks to some degree)

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PERFORMANCE

In the pictures, I completed two GeekBench 7 tests, one on battery, and on on AC power. In addition, I subjected the machine to various loads, including video playback of Air Gear in 1.5x speed, Fate Reawakened gameplay using Wine compatibility layer, llama3.2 local ai inquiry, idle, Need For Speed: Most Wanted using PPSSPP emulator, and Geekbench 7 test. Please make note that running the test, though the script I use is lightweight, does impart a small amount of additional power-usage, therefore had an impact on the fan speeds especially during idle tests, as they otherwise would have been off. The reasons for all of the tests are as follows:

Temperature: To ensure it is not throttling during tasks, as well as gauge equilibrium temperature point during all tasks

Power Consumption: To gauge duration for which each activity can be completed and see how much power can be drawn from 15W TDP chip

RAM: Being that some of them were ran while other programs were open in other windows, the RAM plot is intended to focus on fluctuations over the duration of the test, as the labeled tasks were the only ACTIVE tasks being carried out, thus we are able to see the implications of these operations of memory usage

Fan Speed: We can see that there appears to be only 2 fan settings, of around 3000rpm and 5000rpm, and while there are some intermediate values achieved, for instance in the case of casual browsing, where there is much more fluctuation, at the far pole of 5000rpm, the laptop is considerably loud

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TAKEAWAYS

This laptop has its flaws, primarily stemming from its integrated graphics and aging 22nm cpu architecture, but in a laptop market that refuses to produce simple machines for affordable prices, and instead has people toting heavy chrome just to browse YouTube and outsource their compute to expensive cloud services, this laptop model is a breath of fresh air that is relatively cheap <$150 and fun to go through optimization trials with, especially with Linux. However, I can't in good faith claim it measures up in compute to other models at similar price points, given you get a steal on a more modern T4XX series or Gen1 T14 for <$200. I would argue though that, with the exception of the clips that are somewhat easy to break under the external battery, it is one of the most modular laptops, and even an operation as a full motherboard swap can be done without any instructions. I would advise you though MAKE SURE NOT TO STRIP ANY OF THE SCREWS. The last thing you want is to be the first person to contact a wifi card screw in a decade (though I have learned some tricks out of necessity).

The scripts for these tests are not yet published on GitHub, but use the same protocols as those detailed in the following repository. These can be used for any 2 core laptop with 2 batteries, and even if one or both of these are the case, the scripts can be edited to expand to other cpus.

https://github.com/bpannanymous/BeckCLI

The patient underwent open-chassis surgery, swapping all internal organs into a new chassis, and was discharged in top shape only hours later

I have an x240 (i7-4600u, 8gb ddr3L 1366x768 13" screen, i3 CachyOS). I've been trying to make it as efficient/portable as possible with the following mods:

New internal, 56.6Wh external battery

2 Thermal pads on circled regions of second image

3 additional intake holes to counteract airflow restrictions imposed by thermal pad on cpu heat sink in third image

External cooling pad

Powersaver mode tlp

Thermal repaste

Fan Cleaning

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I also have some ideas for what to do:

Cut bluetooth in bios

Upgrade motherboard to i7-5600U from x250 (too expensive)

Additional heatpipe (not enough space)

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Any suggestions would help, and for reference, I have attached some power usage plots in the following order

Image 4 - Idle on low brightness, no cooling pad

Image 5 - Idle on low brightness, cooling pad

Image 6 - 1080p YouTube video, low brightness, no cooling pad

Image 7 - 1080p YouTube video, low brightness, cooling pad

Image 8 - Elongated video viewing temps, cooling pad

Image 9 - Elongated video viewing fan speeds, cooling pad

Image 10 - Elongated video viewing power usage, cooling pad