by hikaru » Thu Feb 04, 2010 8:09 am
The silent mode is pretty useless. All it does is to prevent the CPU from clocking to its design frequency. Instead it stays in the lowest frequency (in my case 1GHz instead of 1.83GHz). So the temperature should not rise too much. But unless you put heavy load on the CPU, it will stay on its lowest frequency anyway. So if you're doing only office tasks there is no difference in both modes and if you do more power consuming things you usually want the CPU to clock up.
I tried to reassign this button because I had no use for it, but since it sends no key code there was no way to do this. In turn I assume that there is no way to start the silent mode than this button.
I guess you're asking because you feel that your notebook becomes too hot or too loud. In both cases I would suggest to clean the fan and its grill. This might allay your problem a lot.