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Vignesh S
January 20th, 2010, 09:41 AM
Right, before I jump to conclusions based on my limited knowledge about laptop hardware, I want to know what you guys think. Here goes nothing :-)

I was using Windows 7 on my laptop, and then out of the blue, it comes up with the following message:


A problem with the cooling system has been detected. Please turn off your computer immediately, and return it for service

Naturally, I was freaked, but I wanted to know what the problem was. So, I installed a temperature thermometer in Ubuntu that measures the temperature of the CPU. I saw it go up to 57C and the fan didn't turn on. Freaky, seeing that on my old IBM Thinkpad R31, the fans turned on at around that temperature.

Strangely enough, it didn't come up on Windows again, and I used it for like 3-4 hours. This is somewhat strange. After all, it is only a month old.

Vignesh S
January 21st, 2010, 01:43 AM
Maybe this extra information might help. Seeing that I had to use this computer, I loaded up Ubuntu and checked the CPU temperature. It didn't go above 60C and when it did, the fan would turn on to cool it down quite drastically. In fact right now, it is at 45C and has been hovering at around that temperature.

What I'm asking is: should I be concerned about this? I haven't seen it come up again after all.

Sef
January 21st, 2010, 02:12 AM
What I'm asking is: should I be concerned about this? I haven't seen it come up again after all.

Sounds like you got a software issue. Check Windows forums to see if there any solutions yet.

Vignesh S
January 21st, 2010, 02:27 AM
Right, the people at service said that it needed to be fixed :?. Oh well. Would they mind if Ubuntu was on it :-)?

Hwæt
January 21st, 2010, 02:55 AM
Right, the people at service said that it needed to be fixed :?. Oh well. Would they mind if Ubuntu was on it :-)?

Depending on your OEM, that could've voided the warranty.

teward
January 21st, 2010, 02:58 AM
I've put Ubuntu on my Dell Latitude E6500 and they haven't said it voids my warranty, actually they didn't really give a care. They still repaired all the issues on my Windows install and were even nice enough to reinstall Grub onto the system when they were done repairing my WinXP install.

Vignesh S
January 21st, 2010, 06:11 AM
Depending on your OEM, that could've voided the warranty.

Not mine, I asked them, and they said that it didn't void the warranty :-D

L4U
January 21st, 2010, 06:35 AM
Right, before I jump to conclusions based on my limited knowledge about laptop hardware, I want to know what you guys think. Here goes nothing :-)

I was using Windows 7 on my laptop, and then out of the blue, it comes up with the following message:

You won't believe this, but I resolved a similar problem (sorta) just today.


My girlfriend bought a cheap laptop with Vista. It was very buggy, of course, and we noticed it overheated after awhile.

I put XP on it. It ran better than Vista (of course), but her laptop started overheating really fast that she had to buy a laptop fan. The battery seemed to exhausted really fast too, and that was with the external fan unplugged!

I installed a dual boot with Mint 8 (GNOME) and she thinks Linux is better than Windows (Yay!).

It was still having the overheating and short battery life issues, but luckily she bought an extended warranty, so she asked me to put Vista back on so we can take it in to get it fixed.

Before I did, Mint 8 KDE candidate release just came out and figured might as well install it to really try it out instead of using just a livecd. I did an entire disk install, so Mint 8 KDE was the only OS on the laptop, wiping everything else off.

Well guess what? The laptop doesn't over heat anymore and the battery lasts it's full length again!

I'm going to reinstall Vista tomorrow and see if Mint 8 KDE was the miracle worker! I'd like to do a full install of Mint 8 GNOME to see if it was the dual boot with Windows that was causing the problem.

I'll update this tomorrow when I do.

Vignesh S
January 21st, 2010, 08:52 AM
L4U, I think its the same story here. Thing is though, I'm not going to get rid of Win 7 anytime soon, if at all, seeing that Publisher refuses to work without glitches in Crossover.

Toshiba obviously don't agree though, and they actually booked a service for my laptop at the nearby service centre for Toshiba (I'm quite lucky, seeing that that's the only one in Melbourne :?). When you mean overheat, do you mean it actually came up with an error message like mine did?

Seeing that putting another OS on my laptop doesn't void the warranty, and being able to safely test the temperatures of the CPU out, I actually don't think that there is a problem to begin with, and it hasn't even come up again in Windows.

I'd appreciate the update, seeing I probably won't being seeing my laptop for quite some while yet.

L4U
January 21st, 2010, 09:21 AM
When you mean overheat, do you mean it actually came up with an error message like mine did?
No, it just shut off because it got too hot.

The laptop is weird. Vista wouldn't let me put XP over it. I actually had to download a Linux Distro to use its partition editor to erase the Vista partition! Only then I could install XP on it.

I'm curious if the overheating problem will stay fixed with Vista installed. Maybe it was XP the entire time, although not sure why it would still overheat when using the Linux dual boot?

Maybe Microsoft really doesn't want people to use XP anymore!

Vignesh S
January 21st, 2010, 10:43 AM
No, it just shut off because it got too hot.

The laptop is weird. Vista wouldn't let me put XP over it. I actually had to download a Linux Distro to use its partition editor to erase the Vista partition! Only then I could install XP on it.

I'm curious if the overheating problem will stay fixed with Vista installed. Maybe it was XP the entire time, although not sure why it would still overheat when using the Linux dual boot?

Maybe Microsoft really doesn't want people to use XP anymore!

Of course man, I still think people would be content to use Windows 95 if Microsoft hadn't released a new version of Windows consistently ever since. But then again, I don't think that would be the case, seeing that our nature as human beings is to extend upon what has already been done.

Throbbing Gristle
January 21st, 2010, 11:24 AM
Windows is a CPU hog...

Vignesh S
January 21st, 2010, 12:54 PM
Windows is a CPU hog...

Depends on which computer you are using it on :-D. If its on an Xeon supercomputer with 64GB RAM and SLI'ing 5 Nvidia cards, and not to mention the RAM disk, then the person using it would have no idea what you are talking about :-). But if its on an ancient laptop like my old IBM Thinkpad R31 (yes, I did put Vista on that thing, and it didn't last very long), then I see where you are coming from

But for me, boot times matter a LOT. Maybe that's why I hardly touch Windows 7 at the moment. Still trying to get it to boot faster than 2 minutes. For the record, my IBM had a 1.06 GHz processor (single core) while the laptop I am currently typing this out on is 1.3GHz Dual Core. I wander if the extra core makes a difference...

samh785
January 21st, 2010, 01:36 PM
I've put Ubuntu on my Dell Latitude E6500 and they haven't said it voids my warranty, actually they didn't really give a care. They still repaired all the issues on my Windows install and were even nice enough to reinstall Grub onto the system when they were done repairing my WinXP install.
Well, Dell does sell computers with ubuntu pre-installed so I think that they're less likely to freak out over installing ubuntu than other OEMs

Throbbing Gristle
January 21st, 2010, 10:24 PM
Depends on which computer you are using it on :-D. If its on an Xeon supercomputer with 64GB RAM and SLI'ing 5 Nvidia cards, and not to mention the RAM disk, then the person using it would have no idea what you are talking about :-). But if its on an ancient laptop like my old IBM Thinkpad R31 (yes, I did put Vista on that thing, and it didn't last very long), then I see where you are coming from

But for me, boot times matter a LOT. Maybe that's why I hardly touch Windows 7 at the moment. Still trying to get it to boot faster than 2 minutes. For the record, my IBM had a 1.06 GHz processor (single core) while the laptop I am currently typing this out on is 1.3GHz Dual Core. I wander if the extra core makes a difference...

Yup need a super computer to run windows anymore. Had a buddy with a Dell 64bitAMD lap top XP on it. The guy bought a spare battery for it as it would not go past 1 1/2 hours , and it was slow and unresponsive. Put 64 bit ubuntu on it that windows could not do. It ran very fast at every task. The sound card was better too after that switch. It went over 4 hours on a charge

10 year old Toshiba lap top on origanal battery guess the story there. At the time before I had tried my first ubuntu on it . Wire less mouse had to be on top of the computer [with XP] inches away from it to get any response witch was getting old. After the ubuntu install I was 20 feet plus outside the house from the computer looking through a window. The mouse was quick enough for gaming! No Kidding! I had never seen that poor old lap top run that well!



Heck just in the name of going green well........ Net books are running better battery life switched over as well so I hear.

Vignesh S
January 21st, 2010, 11:06 PM
Heck just in the name of going green well........ Net books are running better battery life switched over as well so I hear.

Yeah, that's true. My sister's netbook has an atrocious battery (yet no-one for some reason will replace it), but with wifi on (if its not on, it renders it useless), it lasts 1hr, yet in Ubuntu, it went for 1 1/2 hours, 30 mins more battery :-D.

I just don't get why Windows tried to get into the netbook market, seeing that I don't see much point in running Windows on a small screened computer.

And for the record, my definition of a netbook is a laptop smaller than 10" which isn't running Windows and uses an SSD. The processor doesn't necessarily have to be an intel (preferably, it shouldn't be)

L4U
January 22nd, 2010, 01:32 AM
Vignesh, looks like the biggest culprit was XP believe it or not. I just put Vista back on it didn't overheat.

However, the battery lasted only about an hour, half the time it lasted on the full install of Linux. Seemed to have gotten a little hotter than with just Linux, but not enough to shut the laptop off.

We are deciding whether to put a dual boot of Linux with the Vista and see what happens when running under Linux, or just sell it. Using Linux with the XP boot didn't relieve the overheating problems, so I don't expect being a dual boot with Vista will be much different. Strange.

Stigmata13
January 22nd, 2010, 01:40 AM
Vignesh, looks like the biggest culprit was XP believe it or not. I just put Vista back on it didn't overheat.

However, the battery lasted only about an hour, half the time it lasted on the full install of Linux. Seemed to have gotten a little hotter than with just Linux, but not enough to shut the laptop off.

We are deciding whether to put a dual boot of Linux with the Vista and see what happens when running under Linux, or just sell it. Using Linux with the XP boot didn't relieve the overheating problems, so I don't expect being a dual boot with Vista will be much different. Strange.
Perhaps you could check and make sure your BIOS is up to date?

Vignesh S
January 22nd, 2010, 02:25 AM
Vignesh, looks like the biggest culprit was XP believe it or not. I just put Vista back on it didn't overheat.

However, the battery lasted only about an hour, half the time it lasted on the full install of Linux. Seemed to have gotten a little hotter than with just Linux, but not enough to shut the laptop off.

We are deciding whether to put a dual boot of Linux with the Vista and see what happens when running under Linux, or just sell it. Using Linux with the XP boot didn't relieve the overheating problems, so I don't expect being a dual boot with Vista will be much different. Strange.

Yeah, I remember my friend telling me that Vista is better on laptops and XP on desktops. I still don't see why Vista isn't good on desktops, but now I see why Vista is better on laptops, and it probably has something to do with advanced power management and the like on laptops in the OS. XP is from 2001, and I'm not sure if the more advanced power management options are available on it.

There is no way I'm going back to XP though, its a 2001 OS, and this is 2010, a time of more modern OS's

I wouldn't bother with a BIOS upgrade unless it is absolutely necessary. What exactly are the specs of the laptop your ambitious plan are occurring on?

Vignesh S
January 22nd, 2010, 02:30 AM
And just for the record, I'm taking my laptop into service, seeing that one of the rubber things that make sure the screen doesn't bump against the keyboard is missing ;-). Might as well seeing that I've still got free time.

Vignesh S
January 23rd, 2010, 12:01 PM
So, L4U, how did things go with the laptop?