Laptop lockup

[NoOp]

On 02/23/2008 08:42 AM, Neil Cherry wrote:
> NoOp wrote:
>> On 02/21/2008 08:53 PM, Neil Cherry wrote:
>>> NoOp wrote:
>> 
>>>> BTW: What is your laptop & laptop specs (memory, cpu, ram etc)?
>>> model name      : Mobile Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4     CPU 2.80GHz
>>> stepping        : 9
>>> cpu MHz         : 1599.960
>>> cache size      : 512 KB
>>>
>>>               total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
>>> Mem:        498880     481952      16928          0      10424     146012
>>> -/+ buffers/cache:     325516     173364
>>> Swap:       698788      32252     666536
>>>
>>> 40G Drive
>>>
>> 
>> Model?
> 
> Sorry forgot:
> 
> Toshiba Satellite A45-S151
> 
> BTW, it's not trackerd, I killed it and shut it off but still
> locked up. I did notice that my laptop stayed at 63C most of
> yesterday, though it eventually dropped to 28C. As a general
> rule, if I keep the laptop from going into screen saver mode
> (more likely blanking the screen) then it doesn't lock up.
> If instead I let it goes as far as blank the screen it
> locks up.
> 

63C doesn't sound too bad (try watching a youtube flash video over &
over & over and watch your cpu temp soar :-). However, it sounds like
you might be due for a good old fashioned cleaning & perhaps even new
thermal heatsink compound on the cpu. I fix laptops for friends &
clients on occassion and they tell me that they 'faithfully' blow out
the dust. They somehow seem to forget that "blowing out the dust" often
times just blows the dust deeper into the casing. So, I disassemble &
"vacuum" out the dust, clean everything properly & apply new thermal
heatsink compound to the cpu & they're good to go for another year or so :-)

For your power options, you can install "Configuration Editor" - from a
terminal & modify your power options from there:

sudo apt-get install gconf-editor
killall gnome-panel

Now Applications|System Tools|Configuration Editor

Click to expand the apps folders & then scroll down and open up the
gnome-power-manager folder. If you click on any of the options it will
generally tell you what the option does. Check the 'actions', 'lock' and
'timeout' options in particular. Note: *be sure* you write down the
state of an option *before* you change it, so that you can go back to
the original setting if necessary.