Laptop Temperature

I have ran Windows on my HP laptop for months and it ran cool.

I recently put Suse 9.3 Pro on it and the bottom has become extremely hot and the fans run 24/7.

I have done my fair share of tweaking and stopping unneeded services, configured power managment to throttle cpu, and even deleted stuff off my harddrive.

This is getting to the point where it will get really hot sitting on my lap in almost no time when its started up.

Has anyone expierenced this or know a way to lower the temperature?

Yea, I know people say get a laptop fan system but this is my mobile office and I need to be on the go with it.

Thanks for reading and any help you can give.

Laptop is a HP ze4540

Welcome to LQ. Please define "hot" -- what are the temperatures you're seeing? Laptops do run hotter than desktops due to their more restricted cooling capabilities, but usually the temperature is doesn't get much above the mid 40's C, or approx 115-120 F. As long as you're in that neighborhood, you're good -- J.W.

Run Linux for a while, reboot into the BIOS, and see if you can check the temperatures from there.

I assume you only have SuSe on it ...

I had a similar problem recently (but under Windows and Linux)

It might sound stupid, but try to vacuum clean the air vents of the laptop
sometimes (specially when on the go) dirt and dust accumulates and stops proper cooling.

Hope it helps

hey thanks for the replies. i dont have exact temperatures but the whole unit is much hotter than ususal. Running windows playing HL and CS Source (heavy 3d graphics) still cycles the fans and keeps the bottom decently cool. When i am running linux, the whole laptop will burn my legs doing normal tasks like simple word processing and aim chatting.

PS. I have been here a while. I used to be under a different name (redhatnoob).


Thanks

it will be easier to suggest if you give some specs of your comp... to give thermal specs of your comp do: acpi -t
if the processor is intel i can see it getting hot as mine does also, so i suggest you get powernowd to reduce the clock frequency when your not doing a lot of work...

It really seems that your processor is not reducing it's clockrate as it should. I would also recommend using "powernowd", as it is simple and functions well. Simply installing it should do the trick. Other possibilities are "cpufreqd" and "cpudynd", but you might have to configure them manually to get good results.

If installing (and possibly configuring) one of those daemons does not help, or gives error messages, then try www.google.com/linux. Good keywords are "cpu frequency scaling" and the names of abovementioned daemons. That'll get you started.