laptop overheats, and the fans won't turn on!
 

Hello, all:

I'm running FC3 on a Dell Inspiron 700m laptop. I have checked all of the other posts on laptops overheating, as well as the ACPI Sourceforge page, but to no avail.

According to cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRC/cooling_mode, the cooling mode is passive, along with the message <setting not supported> above it. This is the same in /THRS/cooling_mode (I have no idea why there are two folders in thermal_zone, by the way, but they report different temperatures and trip points).

Current temperature = 57 C = 134.6 F.
Trip points are set for passive cooling only (in other words, my fan will never turn on!), and are set at 90 degrees Celsius! This is ridiculous. I need my fan to turn on. My laptop has locked up due to overheating before. The CPU is scaled down to run at the slowest speed (which happens to be a third of the 1.8 GHz I paid for, sheesh). This isn't an airflow problem, either, and the laptop isn't excessively dusty. It's just that my fan never runs.

Questions:
How do I add active cooling to cooling_mode?
How do I change the trip points?
What is the difference between THRC and THRS?
Other ways for me to cool down my laptop, without spending more money? (I never had this problem with WinXP Pro, so I know it's not a computer hardware problem, so I definitely don't want to go out and buy an external fan.)

If anyone has encountered this problem before, I would really, really appreciate the help. I do all my work on this laptop, so I really need it to run as it should.

Thanks,
Kelly

Have you tried Knoppix or a different live CD to see if it may have the same problem? If it does, it may be a problem with the laptop.

I have tried the ubuntu live CD on this computer, as well as WinXP Pro (which is what came with the machine). I haven't had this problem with Windows, and the fans never once started up in the few hours I used ubuntu. I really don't think it's a problem with the machine, just with the way Linux (or perhaps just Fedora) handles the power management. I'm really just looking for a way to add active cooling to the recognized modes, since it didn't show up, and for a way to alter the trip points.

Does the Inspiron 700m have a mechanical or keyboard-function switch for enabling/disabling the fan, like it does for wireless? Perhaps the fan is just not enabled? Does anyone know?

Check out the links on the bottom of this page:

http://www.diefer.de/i8kfan/

His (Windows) fan control for Dell laptops works well on my Inspiron 8100, and a couple of newer laptops in my office. It's been ported to FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD and there's a kernel module for Linux to access the SMBIOS functions.

There's also some discussion of this problem on the Fedora forum:

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/archiv...p/t-21320.html

and the linux utility:

http://people.debian.org/~dz/i8k/

Good luck!

Oke i got the same problem with the output of acpi modules.
And i want to set then to active as wel.
And my maximum output stands on 95% and my fan only runs when temp is over 65 celsius.
If you have a solution let me know please.

Greats

Armedking

Ok, strange. So I updated to the latest FC3 kernel (I do regular updates with yum), and now the fan seems to be working just fine. Go figure.