overheating of laptop
 

my laptop config:6gb ram | 750 hdd | 2gb ati radeon + intel 4000 series inbuilt gpu when ever i install any version of ubuntu my laptop gets over heated. i have tried installing the amd catalyst drivers but after that i get black screen the what will you suggest????????????

Post your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. sometimes adding either modeset=0 or modeset=1 as a boot option will sometimes help with the catalyst driver don't remember which one to use. This might help for the catalyst driver

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...hable+graphics

This might help if you use the stock drivers instead of the catalyst drivers.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...8/#post4830372

Try a different distro and see if you get the same problem

This thread from Ubuntu might help: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Po...t/ReducedPower

Check system monitor and click CPU % on top of the columns to see what may be over using it? I also second using a different distro with more control* like Debian,,, (on witch Ubuntu is based.) Plus, one of these good for a lap or desk can extend the life of a laptop.

Edit: Oh, sorry I did not read it too well (missed that last part) till now. :redface:

"Check system monitor and click CPU % on top of the columns to see what may be over using it? " I prefer to use top from the konsole. Instantly shows what is eating cpu sycles and you can kill it with a couple of keystrokes. I periodically get a plugin (not sure if it's Firefox or Chrome as I have both open) going berserk and my CPU ramps up and I hear its fan going mad. top, k. accept default process with return, accept default signal with return - peace! Funny thing is, this plugin does that when I'm *not* doing anything that should need it

Is the overheating problem hardware related.
 

Hiyears ago I was building three new laptops on a lab workbench and had installed the OS on all the machines when I was called away. The machines were installed with WindowsNT4 but that does not matter it was a long time ago. Anyway when I came back to the area the head technician had gone home and locked the lab leaving my three laptops happily running on the bench. Laptops have a lot of smarts built into their bios to control their temps and fans but these where new and without correct drivers installed they happily overheated overnight running on the bench and two were dead in the morning. The warranty service engineer told me when he replaced their motherboards always check for newer bios revisions and never treat a laptop like a desktop and expect them to run for extended periods they need their software smarts to tell them to shutdown or hibernate and run cool..

The other thing to look at is the motherboard fan running hold the machine up and listen for noise changes on boot the fan will normally revup and be audible on boot then quiet down as the OS boots, and if visible are the cooling fins where heat comes out the machine clean or furry with dust.

Save Cash
 

I didn't buy one of those chill pads as I use the laptop on a table. Instead I bought a neat little stand from Poundland (in England for £1 - $1.64 at current exchange rate). Clear plastic with USB powered fan to cool the underside of the laptop. Raising the laptop, as it does, also gives better airflow.

lol My ol' Core 2 Duo laptop used to overheat... Problem was ASUS thought it would be a good idea to hook up a hot running Core 2 Duo @ 2.6Ghz and a hot running AMD Radeon 4650M card to a single tiny heatsink... :scratch:

So I cut a big hole out of the cooling intake at the bottom and installed a metal grill :cool:
I still use a high-end undercooler and some side fans. The power brick also has ventilation holes drilled in the top :D
I quite often compile up Gentoo packages for hours on end and the thing doesn't break a sweat now... Plus gaming doesn't lock up the machine anymore :D

I also use the phc-intel patch which is amazing - it drops >5 watts off my power draw at any CPU load (it works by undervolting your CPU). Not so good for Intel CPUs after the Core 2 Duo though I believe (although it is being worked on for Sandybridge I believe)...

AMD powermanagement in the 3.11 kernel works very well - so I now use the radeon OSS kernel driver. If you have dual GPU's (I don't) you probably want to look into hybrid solutions to disable the discrete AMD card when you aren't using it. Would be a nightmare to setup if using the Catalyst driver though I guess.

I use a cpupower daemon to limit the maximum frequency for my CPU as the ACPI temperature of it rises above setpoints. Effectively this is artificial thermal throttling.

The thermal shutdown temperature for mobile CPU's is often around +100C. They will operate up to this temperature - but not very happily and in my case (with the shared heatsink) the GPU will overheat as well in a kind of "thermal runaway"... GPU and CPU chips age faster when you run them hot or overclock them - wearing out much sooner than they otherwise would.

I guess most of this is less relevant on a modern Haswell-based laptop. I did upgrade a Desktop PC for a friend recently. The low power variant of the Core i5 (@2.6Ghz) was idling at 26C on the stock cooler.

There's also some nice bedroom reading on power management @ TLP

:twocents:
Mr Gates