Laptop Fan + overheating

springshades · 07-07-2005, 02:59 AM

They have special cooling pads that you can set a laptop on. Not sure on price, but it would probably be the most effective thing for keeping your laptop cooler. I guess you have to decide how much your time is worth and how much more life you think your computer might have...

windowsrefugeeX · 07-07-2005, 04:07 AM

Yes you are right, I was afraid of this, I knew one day my mobilbabe (laptop) would eventually get old and well lets face it I have "over use" the old girl.

Still thou, I am pretty sure I squeeze another year or two. But my laptop would be limited at what it could do. I am still thinking of buying a new heatsink )perhaps a copper one) and the cooling pad, I also saw a cooling for the ram. But yes you are right I do not want to waste more than mmm lets say 150 bucks if I have to waste more than that then I'll just buy a new one. crap I forgot thou I do need to buy a new dvd-cdr for it, because the one i have does not work anymore <-- that's another story!

springshades · 07-07-2005, 04:15 AM

My vote is for the cooling pad if it's cheap enough. It will be useful for future computers as well, thus it isn't a complete waste of money if your computer dies. This probably isn't as important unless your into gaming, gaming for a long time on a high performance laptop almost requires one of those if you want to keep your computer at reasonable temperatures (say... significantly below boiling point

).

It may be possible to do a network boot and possibly even install a distro that way... I wouldn't know how, but it seems like it must be possible. That might save you the cost of the DVD drive. Good luck getting things to work.

windowsrefugeeX · 07-07-2005, 12:27 PM

springshades

yes you are right, i need my laptop mostly for my school, however you must know that at times lessons become ever so boring. So one must play utk4 hehehehehehehe. I am gonna go and look for a cooling pad, as for the heat sink I do wanna get a copper and get rid of the cheap alimunium. As for the booting of network you are right currently like I mention b4 I have gentoo install (heheh partially stage2 hehehe it seems texinfo does not want to compile it comes back with error 132. some forums say it is cflags being to high, I've changed them but no luck anyhow that's another thread.)

Anyhow I have some work cut up 4 me now, so i am gonna buy the pad, and perhaps the heat sink. as for the dvd-cdr I do need it but it is not essential yet!

lethargic1 · 12-17-2005, 05:58 AM

rather than make a new thread, i thought i should just bump this old one. there's a lot of good idears in here anyways...

as i've been looking around for answers, i've noticed that quite a few laptops seem to have overheating problems while running linux. is it that some laptops just won't work with linux? or maybe it's just difficult to get some distros to work with certain types of hardware?

ever since i installed slack 10.1 on my old compaq presario, it keeps getting physically hot. and even when it's not hot, the fan seems to be on no matter how simple of a program i might be running. and if i try to watch a movie, play a game, compile a program, or just browse the internet my fan kicks into overdrive. after about 15 minutes, my laptop just shuts down without warning.

i tried dmesg and it gives me a lot of info...what should i be looking out for? i also checked /etc/acpi. when i open acpi_handler.sh with a text editor, it gives me

Code:

#!/bin/sh
# Default acpi script that takes an entry for all actions

IFS=${IFS}/
set $@

case "$1" in
  button)
    case "$2" in
      power) /sbin/init 0
         ;;
      *) logger "ACPI action $2 is not defined"
         ;;
    esac
    ;;
  *)
    logger "ACPI group $1 / action $2 is not defined"
    ;;
esac

shouldn't there be more in there? um...maybe not...

i dunno...i've been working on this for quite some time. a cooling pad might be the easiest answer, but i really want to figure out what's going wrong here.

smitpatel · 04-21-2013, 08:39 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by springshades

you need root priveledges for the next steps so:

su
enter your root password

echo -n "userspace" > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor

that replaces performance with userspace which basically is a manual mode of control

in the next line, replace somefrequency with one of the frequencies that you got when you looked at scaling_available_frequencies, it should be one that is lower than your current frequency, this will make your processor much less likely to overheat for awhile, it'll also use less power

echo -n "somefrequency" > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_setspeed

If this DOES work for you, I made my computer boot up to a lower speed by basically adding some of these lines to the end of the file:

/etc/rc.d/rc.local

Then I added in some alias commands so now I can easily change my speed manually by going into a terminal and typing freq2 or something like that. Anyway, hope that helps.

Hey i have ubuntu12.10 on hp notebook-2000 i had windows 7 on it 6 months ago worked very well with the games etc no thermal shutdowns but ever since i have downloaded ubuntu 12.10 i am having the same problem i tried the code you wrote above they all worked untill i got to the root code i entered the password and it su: Authentication failled i tried it several times still it didn't work so is there anything i can do to fix this problem becuase i can't run any games on this thing if i do play games it will shut down in 20-30 minutes because of over heating and yes my fans are all cleaned up it's 1 year old laptop.

EDDY1 · 04-23-2013, 12:15 PM

Quote:

Don't forget the obvious, airflow blockage. Vacuum the dust off the fan screen periodically.

I would agree with this, but, itwouldn't work for me.
I had to take my laptop apart & the lent built up so much it looked like it belonged there.
Not saying it did, but, it looked like a filter. It was definately lacking in the cleaning department.
Anyway, I removed it & it runs cool.
Also I don't put it on the bed anymore, as the blankets are a major contributor of dust & lent.

springshades · 04-25-2013, 01:11 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by smitpatel

Hey i have ubuntu12.10 on hp notebook-2000 i had windows 7 on it 6 months ago worked very well with the games etc no thermal shutdowns but ever since i have downloaded ubuntu 12.10 i am having the same problem i tried the code you wrote above they all worked untill i got to the root code i entered the password and it su: Authentication failled i tried it several times still it didn't work so is there anything i can do to fix this problem becuase i can't run any games on this thing if i do play games it will shut down in 20-30 minutes because of over heating and yes my fans are all cleaned up it's 1 year old laptop.

Sorry that I didn't see this right away. It's a rather old thread at this point.

This issue you're getting is from Ubuntu which has the super user (root) account disabled-ish. In Ubuntu, you're supposed to accomplish things that require super user privileges by sticking a "sudo" in front of every line that requires it. A workaround that should work is to do "sudo su" which is the same thing as just doing "su" on most other distros.

This thread might actually pre-date Ubuntu. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure if anything in this thread will work anymore, it may be obsolete. At the time, the distro I used had essentially no automated way of controlling power, so I *had* to manually control the CPU frequency. Using Linux on a laptop in those days was an absolute nightmare, and I had to hack almost everything to get it to work from the video card, to the wireless, to hacks to bypass root privileges for trivial tasks.

Ubuntu now comes with a package called laptop-mode-tools which will save you a lot of power when running on battery. Also, after you install it, if you're having heat issues while plugged in, there should be an option in a configuration file that the package installs to /etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf which shows up as ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE_ON_AC=0. If you change that 0 to a 1 (you'll need root privileges to edit the file), it will turn on power saving features while you're plugged in which has the nice side effect of reducing the amount of heat. It may also have some unpleasant side effects, but if you don't like it, you can just uninstall.

If this more preferred method doesn't work, you can try manually reducing your CPU frequency and see if the method still works. Just be aware that if you have a discrete graphics card or an AMD APU based laptop, the graphics hardware power requirements (and therefore the heat it produces) tends to dwarf that of the CPU, and reducing the CPU frequency won't do anything about the graphics.

Best of luck.

DJ Shaji · 05-04-2013, 05:17 PM

I have an HP Pavilion g6 laptop, and I had the same heat problem, which turned out to be the Radeon graphics card which cannot be turned off from the bios. After much googling, I found the solution to be:

Quote:

Originally Posted by DJ Shaji

#!/bin/bash

# The default governor for ordniary usage
cpupower -c all frequency-set -g conservative

#Because we have 2 cards installed, we have to check on each boot which one is which
if test -e /sys/class/drm/card1/device/power_method ; then
echo dynpm > /sys/class/drm/card1/device/power_method
else
echo dynpm > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_method
fi

echo OFF > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch

EDDY1 · 05-04-2013, 11:44 PM

Although I responded earlier to this thread, I just realized this thread is 8 years old.