I am running Redhat 9.0 on a Pentium IV laptop. I installed acpi to get my soundcard working and everything was fine. Now it seems to be overheating. I know that the fan turns on at 60C but the machine usually crashes at about 58/59C. If it is allowed to make it to 60 the fan turns on fine and cools it to 45C but it never gets that far!

Is there a way I can change the acpi settings so the fan comes on at 55 instead? (To at least diagnose if overheating is the problem!)

I have also just moved from UK to NZ so could it be some weird different type of down under electricity that is affecting it!

Finally when it crashes it does some weird beeping (1 beep, 3 beeps, 3 beeps, 1 beep) that is not mentioned in my very brief user manual.

Sorry I can't write more but the temp is approaching 55 so I better post before I can't!

Thanks.

I don´t think that the temperature is the cause for crashing. I have a laptop with a PIV and temperatures of 55ºC to 60ºC is usual.

Thanks for the swift reply.

I had a feeling that might not be it though it is showing most of the signs of overheating, ie if you leave it off for longer it runs for longer. If you turn it on and the temp is about 45 you only get a few minutes (it always seems to go at about 59C though I can't find an applet to monitor the temp for me so I'm doing it by hand).

Any top tips for trying to find out what crashes it? Which files should I be looking at? /var/log/messages just tells me the last thing it was doing and doesn't give any hints.

Well I just made it to 60C and the fan came on fine and cooled it to 45C. I've looked up the beep code 1-3-3 for a phoenix bios and apparantly the computer has memory problems and I should replace the motherboard. However as I'm using the machine to write this I'm reluctant to do that as it seems to be working fine (for the moment)!

As I said any hints on which sys files/logs might point to the answer gratefully accepted.

God, I hate intermittent faults.

Thanks again.

The release notes for Fedora Core 1 mention "laptop mode" which is now native in Fedora that limits hard drive access to batches.

Thanks for that, maybe it's time to upgrade and see if all my problems are solved.