Help needed with overheating on Dell I8500
 

Hi all,

I recently switched to linux and thought everything was working fine until I discovered there was something very wrong possibly with the power management. My Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop shut down twice due to overheating, which never happened before with windows no matter how long I kept the machine on (not to suggest linux is inferior, just that the problem should not be associated with the hardware). I'm using kernel 2.6.9 and I have enabled acpi and speedstep. I checked the temperature after the last shut down typing "cat /etc/proc/acpi/thermal_zone/thm/temperature" and it said it was at 72 C, certainly a dangerous temp. What should I do? This is the first time I use linux and I just don't have any ideas for a solution. Can some one please help?

p.s. I saw in another post maybe using i8kfan or something I can control the fan speed and thus temperature. Would that help?

Thanks in advance.

by the way, I'm using slackware 10