Laptop overheats - jaunty

[abhiroopb]

I know this has been repeatedly posted, but I thought I would bring some of it together. I do not have a solution for this, but there are a few promising ideas in bug reports.

Basically, what seems to be happening is that the fan on laptops takes too long to spin up and even when it does so, it is not at a high enough speed to cool down the CPU. So, the CPU stays hot and eventually the laptop shuts down (this has happened to me multiple times).

A possible solution is to keep the fan speed at a high setting and leave it like that.

This seems a little drastic, and I have no idea how it may affect the fan in the long run.

The various bug reports (which seem similar) are:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/361123
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...ux/+bug/370173
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/375285

There are also a number of threads on this issue in the forum:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1129135
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1135358
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1130450
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1175054
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1149565
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1175692
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1136575
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=7285275

I'm sure there are more threads and also situations where people are blaming other components, however, this is a good sample I believe.

This old guide for CPU Frequency Scaling has been suggested, but since it appears that the problem is with the fan, setting the CPU to a lower speed may solve the problem, but it is not an effective overall solution.

There is another suggested fix but I am unsure what it does, although it is supposed to help!

In conclusion I was wondering if there was any conclusive answer to this, or if anyone was working towards one.

[chezzo]

I'm not sure that there might not be two problems involved-

When I first installed Jaunty, although my CPU scaling was set at "ondemand" my CPU seemed to be stuck at its maximum rate (1.87 GHz) so, following this thread I installed the package powernowd, which fixed this issue.

However, my laptop still gets hot and I basically have to keep on "powersave" mode using the CPU scaling monitor to prevent it from burning up too much (I haven't actually experienced any shutdowns but that may be because of putting it in powersave when it starts feeling too hot). I hadn't noticed before, but the fan definitely does seem to just stay on its lowest setting all the time, so I think you must be right that there is a fan issue. This would also explain why people with many different types of processor are all having the same problem.

Some people have also been complaining that their pc starts up in "performance" mode by default - which suggests a third problem, unless this is also fixed by installing powernowd.

Hoping for a fix very soon!

[abhiroopb]

I installed it as well, will update on how it worked....

Does it require any configuration?

[chezzo]

No, think I may have restarted but that was it.

[abhiroopb]

Hopefully this will partly sort the issue, but I think the main thing seems to be the fan issue.

[jijin]

Having the same issue here. Nothing in /proc/apci/fan/ btw.