Overheating Laptop

Derek Broughton news at pointerstop.ca
Mon Jun 16 15:23:29 UTC 2008


Pastor JW wrote:

> On Saturday 14 June 2008 08:08:55 am Keith Clark wrote:
>> This is driving me crazy!!!!!
>>
>> I have a Compaq R4000 laptop and it continually crashes due to
>> overheating.  If I do anything more than check my email, it is too much
>> for it and it shuts down.  Rebooting takes 30 minutes after that.
>>
>> Under Windows I never had one issue with heat, so it must be a driver
>> problem somewhere.
>>
>> Any ideas, or is it back to Windows for this laptop?
> 
> I don't understand this question as Windoze doesn't run any cooler.  In
> fact it seems to raise the user's personal temperature!  

Er, yes :-)  But the fact is that ACPI implementations are often buggy, and
tested only on Windows, so things like fan controls fairly frequently work
better in Windows than Linux.

Sorry, if I repeat anything that has already been said, as I wasn't
following this thread, until I just now came across it while my laptop was
literally burning my lap!

The sensors command was telling me my laptop was at 71C:
$ sensors
coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Core 0:      +71.0°C  (crit = +100.0°C)

yet:
$  cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/*/temperature
temperature:             0 C

Now, I knew I'd seen a value there before, so figured that the "thermal"
module was broken somehow (note, I used the * in that path because there is
no way to say exactly what the ACPI controls are named on any particular
system - this seems to be at the root of some later statements about files
being "missing" - not all systems have the same files).  So I did:
$ sudo modprobe thermal -r
$ sudo modprobe thermal

And, voila, the fan promptly started up at low speed and brought the
temperature fairly quickly down to 50C (now visible in /proc/acpi/...)
before turning off.  I suspect it's not resuming properly after hibernate,
so if I ever find out (again) where to set that for pm, I'll have it
remove "thermal" before hibernating, then insert it on resume.
-- 
derek





More information about the ubuntu-users mailing list