All credit to Shmidt

I've decided to upgrade my unit to 80GB but was worried about the extra thickness/heat of the new drive.

That is a real problem indeed. Once I've installed the new drive, the drive temperature has jumpted from 44-45C to 50-51C and the CPU temperature from 49-50C to 54-55C.

I've used to have a VAIO TR in the past and I know for a fact that these drives can sustain up to 60-65C, although I was worried about the CPU fan.

There is a way to lower both the CPU/Drive Temperature and pretty much eliminate the negative effect of that upgrade.

You can use a program called Notebook Hardware Control

http://www.pbus-167.com/nhc/nhc.htm#anchor_download

Once you download it, please make sure that you have .NET Framework 2.0, which is needed for te NHC and if you dont, you can download it directly from Microsoft here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...DisplayLang=en

Once you install the .NET and NHC

you can browse through the menues to get comfortable with the application and change few values:

Under CPU voltages,

You can select 6x 7x 8x 9x and for every single multipler you can set the voltage to 0.9375V

The system will do a short stress test and all the values will be set.

This will drop the voltage to your processor and respectively the heat that it emits.

You will see the effect mostly when the computer is under load, since the 0.9375V is the defaut for 800Mhz and you will not see any temperature drop while you are browsing, reading email, etc.

The second change is under HARD Disk menu:

Set the AC Standby to 30minutes if you are not bothered by the 3-4seconds delay of the hard drive spinning up, when you haven't used anything from the drive for 30+ minutes or you can leave as is:

AC-> Never, Batteries->30min

most importantly under advanced power management:

select Enable Spin Down.

This will enable the drive to spin down to a lower RPM when it is not used rather than spinng at 4200RPM all the time.

from the average of 51C the drive temprature will drop down to 46-47, which is much more normal and your fan will become silent again.

When I say normal, I am comparing my UX280 with my TXN15 which has EXACTLY the same drive and exactly the same settings. The TXN has a drive temperature of 43-44C most of the time.

Additionally, your battery life with the Bluetooth/Wireless and the Screen to 100% will be around 1h58m with the standard battery, which is almost the same as with the 40GB drive