Overheating issues
 

Hello,
Has anybody else had overheating issues with their laptop? I have an emachines M5309 with an AMD 2500 XP-M CPU, and if I don't have a table fan or something running next to it, it will overheat and shut down if I run mplayer/mencoder for more than like 15 minutes. I have lm_sensors installed, but it cannot detect any of my sensory hardware; so, I would like to know, is there underclocking software available for Linux or something? In windows the fan runs at reasonable speeds but in Linux it's always set to full blast, and that seems kind of weird. Or maybe just get one of those add-on fans that slides under my laptop, do those work? Any advice is very much appreciated, as I'm a newb.
Thanks!
JGC

CPU Freq
 

I am not familar with your laptop but I run my laptop (IBM X23) at the slowest CPU setting using CPUFREQ. Google for some documentation on CPUFREQ or look at the information that comes from a stock kernel (kernel.org).

Good luck!

OK, I will tinker with that. Something else that troubles me is that the fan runs at highest speed even when I'm not doing anything at all. Is that normal? Is it possible that I have tasks running in the background maybe?

Getting a Process List
 

You can get a list of all processes running on your machine with a "ps -aux". Don't be worried if you get a large list many of those processes might be idle. You can see a list of processes and their CPU activity by running "top". Again I have no fan issues on my IBM X23 Thinkpad.

Overheating issues
 

I had a problem with temp and fan control on Toshiba A60 with FC3 . I used this shell script to monitor temp and control fan.
#!/bin/bash
while [ 1 ]; do cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THZN/temperature ; sleep 5 ; done

Or to run it in an xterm
#!/bin/bash
exec xterm -geometry 30x3 -e $HOME/temp.sh

I now fix the problem with the line
echo 5 > /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THZN/polling_frequency
in /etc/rc.d/rc.local, but reports indicate it doesn't work with all PC's/bioses.

Works fine now, no more sudden shutdowns. Didn't need to adjust cpu speed.

hth
Chris