When I do anything that is graphics intensive on my laptop it crashes. I've been able to recreate the issue with suse 11 rc1, Ubuntu Hardy Heron and Ubuntu Feisty.

If I do something like move a windows around my fan will kick on at the highest speed for a few seconds and then the laptop will power off. I can also scroll a firefox windows up and down or spin my desktop cube with compiz with the same result.

So the fan kicks on like it's getting hot but sometimes the laptop is even cold and it still crashes.

Nothing gets written to messages or anything else that I can find. I'm not quite sure how to troubleshoot this one. Are there any kind of debugging tools or process monitors like filemon or procmon.exe from sysinternals for windows?

Thanks for any insight.

I've got a D820 with a T2600 (CoreDuo @2.16 GHz) and an Nivida Quadro NVS 110M.

I didn't expect it, but I really _love_ this laptop, aside from abysmal battery life.

I also had occasional lockups/freezes, but I tracked those down to the integrated STAC 92xx audio and ALSA drivers in Ubuntu version 7.10 and earlier).

Moving to 8.04/Hardy Heron made a monumental difference in stability -- I've not had a single lockup since installing it, and I've been using 8.04 since ~beta1 was released.

That being said, I also disassembled the laptop and discovered (eek) nearly no thermal paste either on the CPU or GPU. I cleaned the tops of the CPU and GPU off, then the heatpipe contacts, and applied a very thin layer of some extra thermal good I had sitting in my server room. Idle CPU temps dropped about 25C (to ~40C) for the CPU and the GPU is much cooler as well--somewhere around 46-50C during normal use.

Are you using the sensors-applet for Gnome? If not, I recommend installing it to see what your CPU/GPU temps are, and how much they change during various activities. Constantly-high temps during idle periods and massive spikes/blips could indicate poor contact of the CPU/GPU surfaces with the heat pipe.

Hope this helps.