Different hardware. If you put a Chevy 350 V8 in a school bus, it will be under alot more strain than the exact same engine in a 70's era Vega.....

Different loads on the processor, different mobo's. I can cut my fan to run at a lower temp, but then it cuts into my battery time. Tradeoffs.

I thought this post might get some attention :)
so it seems the average Pentium M sits around 45-55 degrees independant of the load on cpu, or governor used.

Bird - yes i think your right about it misreporting @ 100 degrees... cripes!.
Mixtr - Looks like you got a sweet machine there.. 45+ on a full load, wow!
Raska - seems AMD must be ontop of their game. i remember reading that they were putting a lot into temperature reduction... my last laptop was a Compaq pres 900/ Athlon XP 1700+ and that thing was a 'reactor' :) There was a rubber/latex square on the bottom that was like a non-slip matt (about the size of a CD) - the glue eventually completely melted and the whole thing came off! .. lol
ccwilson - i might look into this as well as my fan seems to on most of the time linux.

I wonder what the fry/die point of these puppies is? Seems like they can handle higher temps than their desktop cousins. My old Desktop AMD Athlon 1.4ghz had a fan failure one day and in no less than 20 seconds it it was toast.
well i am glad i now know my current slice of 'sheek techie pie' runs with the best of em.. it was bugging me for sometime..

I have a Dell Inspiron 9300 2GHz, 1 Gig Ram with so much 'desk clutter' around that I'm always concerned that I will block the air vents. But I seem pretty ok ;)

Changed my defaults for temp limits that I posted earlier, now runs < 45 all the time, fan runs more, but not unbearably so

I have a IBM X31 with Pentium M centrino 1.5Mhz. Most of the time the fan is idle except highest load time such as compiling stuff. The temperature is normally 56 C to 60 C here at 1.5Mhz. If the freq. of CPU is set to lowest 600Mhz, the temperature drops to 48 C or little more.

In winter, I like the temperature because it warms me :), while in summer, I hate it because I can never put it on my lap or I may burn myself ;)

My question is whether there is any way to drop the temperature when I sometimes need to put the laptop on my lap?

Prob worth looking into what ccwilson posted earlier in the thread about the 'trip points' for the fan.. (/etc/rc.d/rc.local)it seems that the temperature will idle at around the same temp you set this value to..

Just a small update on my system:

It's a Gateway, and I have to, on occasion, resolder the power connector to the motherboard. Last night, had to do it again. Booted it up, and ran it for 5-6 hours until I noticed that it seemed to be warmer than usual. When I checked, it was 97C. Huh..... Then I remembered that I had forgot to plug in the fan....

Runs fine now tho....lol

the people who report temp over 90C i think it is in fahrenheit instead of centigrade... unless they got some proper hardcore Heatsinks...

Mine was 97 Celcius. No fan. Hot. Processor will get. Lap is toasted.

ccwilson =) 97degrees.. that is hot! i would have thought that the termal shutdown in the Intel CPU's ould kick in by then.. Maybe you need something compiled into your kernel for it to work in linux...
Well i have since switched to the ondemand governor and now hover between 47-55 degrees.. which is better than before... the fan only fires up when under a load to.

I have a centrino 1.6 and it runs idle 39-40C (fan starts after 39C and stops at 38C so fan runs almost everytime ). After 49C fan runs faster so my laptos fan has two power state
$cat /proc/acpi/fan/(anything goes up!)??? is this normal
I'm using slackware current with kernel 2.6.15.6(i updated my kernel yesterday :) )
I added these lines to rc.modules
#### ACPI suport ####
/sbin/modprobe ac
/sbin/modprobe battery
/sbin/modprobe video
/sbin/modprobe button
/sbin/modprobe fan
/sbin/modprobe thermal
/sbin/modprobe container
/sbin/modprobe processor
Do i need to add something more here?

Hey there - might want to check out what ccwilson posted earlier.. he has changed the trip points for when the fan kicks off in his machine. you could change yours to 45 degrees or there abouts which may help.... Also, are you using a cpufreq governor at the moment?
quote from ccwilson:
Here's how I set mine: (Put in /etc/rc.d/rc.local )
Code:

# Set the trip point temperatures (in Celsius) echo -n "100:0:90:80:58" > /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/trip_points # Activate the temperature control system of the kernel echo -n "30" > /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/polling_frequency # Turn off the fan echo -n "3" > /proc/acpi/fan/FAN0/state

As you can see, my fan doesn't even turn on until 58C. I do mess with it every once inna while. I needed the above because otherwise my fan was on all the time. You can change the trip point to what you want, but make sure you keep all five.

samsonite
 

david@host:~$ cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/temperature
temperature: 55 C

After a compilation that put it up to 70, I'm back to 55.

I normally use my laptop's bag to avoid frying my [you know what ;) ]. It's a green Samsonite. I have used it for about 10 months, no problems so far.

I was reading something kinda interesting (and a bit frightening)... truck drivers have their fertility rates decreased because of the engine's heat... I think the same could apply to laptop users...

So far the bag protects me. :) (hopefully)

2.6.14.6
 

By the way, I'm using Kernel 2.6.14.6 patched with the latest ipw2200. I remember that my laptop used to "feel" cooler with 2.6.10. Not verified, though. I think back then I didn't use it too much anyway.

not sure if anyone is still looking at this thread but with conservative mode.. do you find that it up's the frequency but at a lesser rate than the ondemand governor... I find when i use it it does not seem to change the freq at all... EVER,
does it still use the info in /etc/cpufreqd.conf

im not sure that mine actually is.. doesnt matter what i set the rules to it does not seem to change.