A Lenovo W540 was overheating, peaking at 99° before the Intel Core i7 4700MQ would automatically throttle down the speed to prevent permanent damage. A nasty side effect of this is reduced performance. A workstation-grade laptop should be able to handle this kind of heat without issue, what was going wrong!? This was obviously something hardware related since the fan would run at 100% while the air coming out of the fan was room temperature and the CPU was ready to boil water. After disassembling the machine I noticed the heat sink compound wasn’t “smooshed” against the CPU like it should be:
Take a closer look at the image above. What is that desiccant ball doing in there, keeping the heatsink from pressing against the CPU correctly??
Close up of the heat culprit:
I’m going to assume this mistakenly fell in during initial assembly and isn’t an intended feature. After removing the ball and securing the heatsink the compound spread much more evenly:
Allegient, my new employer, uses GitLab for source control on the project I am currently engaged on. I’ve primarily been using TFS at my previous position.
Working with a specific branch in Visual Studio 2013 isn’t as intuitive as I expected. Here are the steps I followed to get a specific branch from GitLab (or any Git-based server).
In Visual Studio, open up the Team Explorer tab, and select the Connect icon. Enter the URL of the Git project into the textbox. Select Clone.
The project will pull down into the designated folder. You will notice that the branch you want to work with is missing!
Double click the project that is now listed, which will open up the Home screen for that project. From there click on the Branch dropdown and select New Branch.
The branches for the project are listed in the dropdown. Select the desired branch and click “Create Branch”. As counter-intuitive as this sounds, it simply pulls down the branch to your machine. After it is created you will be able to open the .sln and start developing!
