SERIOUS laptop overheating and shutdown

[houbysoft.xf.cz]

Hi, I have an HP pavilion dv6 1280us laptop with an AMD Turion X2 Ultra 64 bit processor and an ATI radeon graphics card.

The laptop is seriously overheating in ubuntu when the CPU is at 100% (usually when I run Handbrake, for example, but sometimes, even after a longer period of time of using it for non-CPU intensive things like browsing the web) which results in an "automatic" shutdown -- ie. the thing shuts down as if you cut power and then can't be turned on again for a while until it cools a little, I'm guessing.

It runs Ubuntu 10.04 64bit. The same thing does not happen in Windows. It is clearly not a hardware issue.

I've googled a lot and tried many things, like using the fglrx driver instead of the open source one which seems to have helped a little but it still overheats and shuts down sometimes.

Any pointers?

Thanks in advance.

P.S.
As a temporary solution, is it at least possible to "hard-code" the CPU frequency and disable scaling? ie. make it run at say 50% all the time?

[nixscripter]

Do you have cpufrequtils? It can save quite a bit of power by reducing your processing time.

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/howto-chan...in-ubuntu.html

[RJARRRPCGP]

Hi, I have an HP pavilion dv6 1280us laptop with an AMD Turion X2 Ultra 64 bit processor and an ATI radeon graphics card.

The laptop is seriously overheating in ubuntu when the CPU is at 100% (usually when I run Handbrake, for example, but sometimes, even after a longer period of time of using it for non-CPU intensive things like browsing the web) which results in an "automatic" shutdown -- ie. the thing shuts down as if you cut power and then can't be turned on again for a while until it cools a little, I'm guessing.

It runs Ubuntu 10.04 64bit. The same thing does not happen in Windows. It is clearly not a hardware issue.

Sounds like the processor fan isn't running fast enough. Does it sound like the fan is even running?

[houbysoft.xf.cz]

@nixscripter: yes, I do -- this is why it only shuts down when CPU intensive tasks are done since the CPU is scaled up.

@RJARRRPCGP: yes, it actually runs really fast (as far as I can tell from the sound) when the CPU is scaled up, but it doesn't seem to be enough (it still shuts down).

[nixscripter]

You can tell cpufrequtils to never scale up by running it on "powersave" instead of "conservative" or "ondemand". That might fix it.

[artemyv]

you may also want to check (using System Monitor or the likes) what is using CPU when comp should be idle...

I have noted on my laptop - after I used any wine program the CPU usage stays to high even after I exit it - the cause was wineserver. So I just kill 2 wine processes manually after exiting wine program - which brings CPU back to half-speed immediately

(I'm using CPU frequency scaling monitor in panel...)

[houbysoft.xf.cz]

@nixscripter: I know, but that's not really a solution.. especially in Handbrake and similar applications, it of course helps to have it at maximum.

@artemyv: that's not the problem, when it should be idle, it is, the problem is when I run CPU-intensive applications.

[artemyv]

@nixscripter: I know, but that's not really a solution.. especially in Handbrake and similar applications, it of course helps to have it at maximum.

@artemyv: that's not the problem, when it should be idle, it is, the problem is when I run CPU-intensive applications.

What I would suggest in this case - To try some custom solution ( I'm not able to provide it just to point in the direction you could look for)

For my Acer Aspire One - I have used (maybe even am using right now ) - some fan-monitoring script that was scaling down the fan speed when CPU temperature was low and speeding it up when the CPU temperature was high.

You could try to find such a script and modify it to actually low CPU Frequency when the temperature of CPU is higher than High-Limit and (If CPU Scaling Monitor does it - your script probably could do it as well)

And switch back to OnDemand behavior when the temperature goes down below some Low-limit

[guitarmaster]

OK, option 1 is to open up your laptop and give it a really good once over with an air blaster, make sure you get rid of all the dust in there that will be compounding your overheating problem. Thanks to@cunningphil on twitter for this suggestion.

If that doesn't help then option 2 might be something like this, which I'm currently using and seems to be having the desired affect:

Enter the following code into a file:

#!/bin/bash

while :

do

if [ `acpi -t | awk '{print $4}' | awk -F "." '{print $1}'` -gt 84 ]
 then
   kill -STOP `ps ax | grep [g]hb | awk '{print$1}'`
sleep 30
   kill -CONT `ps ax | grep [g]hb | awk '{print$1}'`
fi

done

Save your file and make it executable. Next, start your video encoding using handbrake, and in a separate terminal window, run your batch file.

It relies on you having sensible output from the acpi command, which you ma not have by defualt. If acpi does not work for you, then try installing lm-sensors

You would then need to update the script to lm-sensors instead of acpi.

Let me know how you get on with this. You might need to adjust the temperature threshold. I'm using 84 degrees, which may be a little overzealous, I don't know. I'm still experimenting with it!

[guitarmaster]

There is also a nice script that you can install from synaptic called "h264enc", which seems to work quite nicely. It's a little fiddly to begin with, but it is nice-able.