<html><head><style type='text/css'>p { margin: 0; }</style></head><body><div style='font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; color: #000000'><br><hr id="zwchr"><blockquote style="border-left: 2px solid rgb(16, 16, 255); margin-left: 5px; padding-left: 5px;" mce_style="border-left:2px solid #1010ff;margin-left:5px;padding-left:5px;"><b>From: </b>"Simon Greenwood" <sfgreenwood@gmail.com><div class="gmail_quote"><br><div><br>That is very similar to my problem: both Flash and Java apps caused exponential CPU usage. Shutting down everything would cause the machine to settle down but it wouldn't become stable until a full reboot. I would suggest checking to see if there's a BIOS update for the machine as I've just done that and it's seemed to resolve the heating issues that I had that apparently came from the Nvidia GPU. Also you don't mention the version and architecture of Ubuntu that you're using which might be useful to
know.<br></div></div></blockquote><br>Sorry, I am running Ubuntu 10.04. Dell does have a new bios update for download (http://dell.to/ez3bkC), which I can try. However I thought I'd double check here before running it .. :) <br><br>From the instructions:<br>. If not already logged in as root, change user ID to root.<br>2. At the shell, switch to run level 1 by executing "init 1".<br>3. Make the update program executable by executing "chmod u+x update_program_name".<br>4. Run the update ...<br>...<br><br>Is this a common way of updating the bios on Ubuntu? Running "sudo init 1" from a gnome-terminal didn't quite work for me. I got a screen with text that eventually stopped running. Thankfully pressing the power button briefly responded by shutting down. Should I be doing all this without running X?<br><br>Thanks,<br>Rossen<br><br><br><br></div></body></html>