The Overheating School Computer Room
A rural secondary school in a hot, dusty region has a computer room with 20 desktop PCs used for BGCSE Computer Studies lessons. The room has one small window, no air conditioning, and an evaporative cooler that is only switched on during the hottest hours. Teachers report that after about 40 minutes of use, several PCs shut down without warning, hard-drive activity becomes noisy, and dust builds up visibly inside the cases and on the fan grilles. The machines are five years old, and the school budget can only cover either one repair visit per term or a set of low-cost accessories. Students have also started losing unsaved work when the shutdowns occur.
1. Explain the most likely causes of the sudden shutdowns and recommend a low-cost plan to reduce them, justifying each measure.
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The symptoms point to thermal problems. Shutdowns after 40 minutes of use, noisy drive activity and visible dust are consistent with overheating rather than software faults. Dust coats heat sinks and fan blades, reducing airflow; the evaporative cooler raises humidity and can blow dust into the cases; and the room temperature is high with no air conditioning. When the CPU reaches its thermal limit, the system protects itself by powering off, which explains the abrupt loss of unsaved work.
A suitable low-cost plan:
- Clean the machines each term: open cases, blow out dust from fans and heat sinks, and clean grilles. This directly restores airflow and costs only labour and a soft brush.
- Improve ventilation: keep cases away from walls, open the window in the cooler part of the day, and avoid running the evaporative cooler directly toward the PCs.
- Set up automatic saving or teach students to save every few minutes, so a shutdown loses little work.
- Stagger practical sessions so not all 20 machines run heavy tasks at once, reducing heat build-up.
- Monitor one machine's temperature and record when shutdowns happen, to confirm the cause before spending money.
Repair visits should be kept for machines that still fail after cleaning, because cleaning addresses the most likely cause at almost no cost.
2. A parent suggests replacing the desktops with laptops because 'laptops do not overheat'. Evaluate this suggestion.
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The suggestion is not a reliable solution. Laptops are more tightly packed than desktops, with smaller fans and heat sinks, so in a hot, dusty room they can overheat more quickly. Their batteries also degrade faster at high temperatures, and repairs are usually more expensive because parts are customised.
However, laptops have advantages worth weighing: they are portable, use less power, and can be moved to a cooler room. The judgement depends on constraints. The school has a very small budget, and replacing 20 desktops is far more expensive than cleaning and maintaining them. A better decision is to fix the existing thermal problem first, then consider a few laptops only if lessons need portability.
So the claim 'laptops do not overheat' is factually wrong, and the replacement plan is poor value for this school's budget.