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My laptop (with Centrino processor) seems to be running hotter underneath than usual - either it's the summer heat or something different with 2009.0, but whatever, the base of the laptop feels hot. This may or may not be the reason why my RAM died this week, but I'd quite like it if the new RAM I just bought didn't go the same way...

 

Frequency stepping certainly seems to be enabled, gkrellm shows 600MHz when I'm not doing anything, which is good, but I'm wondering if there's a way to control the fan settings so it comes on at a lower temperature. The fan does come on if the processor really has to do work but I'm wondering whether that fan cools the RAM chips anyway.

 

Any ideas?

 

 

[moved from Hardware by spinynorman]

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Did you check in the BIOS if there are any settings for the fan speed?

 

If you already have frequency stepping enabled then there isn't anything else that I know of that you can do from the OS to reduce heat, I have never heard of Linux utilities to change the fan behaviour.

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Hello Neddie.

 

How long have you had the Laptop ?. If it is a fair while then it could be as simple as the fan, the air inlet and its filter being blocked by accumulated dust or the fan not running at full speed due to failing bearings.

Most overheating problems are caused by these two problems than any other.

 

Cheers. John

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The fan does come on if the processor really has to do work but I'm wondering whether that fan cools the RAM chips anyway.

 

well the fan you're talking about doesn't refresh the ram...maybe in some new models or strange one, the fan you're talking about is to refresh the processor which is always warm or hot (mainly intel) you can check out the Bios as tux said but it is always precise and sometimes goes wrong for some reason (I've tested many laptops now ;) )

 

What I do to keep my notebook away from overheat, keeping it in a place with constant air flow, if there isn't then air conditioner or an external fan, laptops sometimes seems to be overheating but one reason could be that, also when you're using too much video (watching videos, playing games,...)but it always has a limit, when you reach max temperature or near your notebook should restart (has happened to me before,..) it is some kind of protection...maybe you could consider now in summer open some windows or using air conditioner, maybe the fan has some dirt as Aussie John said...

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Thanks guys.

Yes the laptop is fairly old now, getting on for 4 and half years old. But the fan does come on and doesn't sound like it's got faulty bearings. And if it wasn't able to run at full speed due to gunk or whatever then it should run more often I'd have thought.

Yes the cpufreq is running as I said, and steps down from 1600 to 600 MHz as it should. But I'm not actually sure whether there is a temperature problem, it just feels hot and I seem to be having ram problems so I'm putting the two together. Maybe I'm wrong and it was always so warm, maybe the ram problems have nothing to do with temperature, maybe I haven't got a clue what's going wrong...

 

Anyway I've now got just one stick of brand new ram in there, and weird things are still happening - last night it just switched itself off for no reason (under low load, not too high temperature, propped up on a book for ventilation, hadn't been on for more than an hour) and refused point blank to boot again, despite several attempts. I took out the ram, put the same stick back in again and immediately it (seems to be) fine again, at least until the next time. memtest didn't find any problems with my old 512 MB stick, but didn't even acknowledge the old 256 MB stick.

 

Sigh. So I'm now thinking maybe power, maybe motherboard, maybe something to do with graphics (because I get white flickery dots on the screen when it fails to boot). Maybe time for a new laptop?

 

Thanks for the powertop tip, is that in Mandriva repos or does it need compiling from source?

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Thanks for the powertop tip, is that in Mandriva repos or does it need compiling from source?

 

My laptop runs Mandriva 2008.0 and powertop was in the repos for this version of Mandriva.

 

 

I don't have much experience with laptop hardware. On desktop motherboards, there is a switch to clear the CMOS. Can the same be done on a laptop? It is possible that your CMOS has been corrupted. I would certainly try to clear the CMOS before buying a new laptop.

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I had a faulty fan assembly on my T42 ThinkPad after it was about 3 years old. The fan did run, but apparently not fast enough or else it was clogged. My T42 was under warranty, and the shop replaced it. Problem solved.

 

I used kima to monitor my temp. settings. I understand imsensors does this as well, but I believe I like kima better. In my case it was the GPU that was overheating, not so much the CPU. This I found out with kima. My laptop actually shutdown when the GPU reached about 98 deg. C. (a safety feature).

 

Other things that can cause a laptop to run hot (esp. the base) is the WLAN card and the Hard Drive.

 

They (someone) does make cooling bases for laptops so that your legs don't burn. My wife's nephew had one for his Sony laptop.

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They (someone) does make cooling bases for laptops so that your legs don't burn. My wife's nephew had one for his Sony laptop.

I made one from a piece plywood and 2X4 with a piece of pipe lagging. Don't know the cost as it was all from off-cuts.

Edited by SilverSurfer60
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I used kima to monitor my temp. settings.
I installed kima, but I don't know whether to take it seriously or not.

From the docs in /usr/share/doc/kima:

Kima is an application specially designed to do nothing you would ever want.

Kima is a program that lets you do absolutely nothing.

The Squiggle Tool is used to draw squiggly lines all over the Kima main window. It's not a bug, it's a feature!

:unsure:

 

Anyway according to the urpmq -i it's an applet for Kicker, so I go to "Add Applet to Panel" and Kima's not in the list. Is this another KDE3/KDE4 directory mixup or is there another way to start Kima?

 

Also I installed powertop from the repos, it's just confirming that I'm running at 600 MHz most of the time which is good.

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neddie, I don't see a real temperature reading here. How do you know that your laptop is running hotter than usual, except for the way it feels? Do you have anything installed to give you a reading e.g., ktemperature?

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You're right, I'm just going by the way it feels. And I've got other problems with the laptop (regularly failing to boot, as I described earlier) which I'm thinking may be connected to the temperature if indeed the temperature is higher than it was. I did say I was guessing :)

I have gkrellm which tells me THM 40 degrees C, which sounds quite cool. And /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THM/temperature tells me something similar, around 43 degrees C (and apparently ktemperature just reads this location anyway). But I've only just switched it on a few minutes ago.

I tried running hugin to stitch some big pics, and that forced the CPU up to max power, and the fan came on, sounding normal, the temperature rose but the number didn't sound alarmingly high (50s).

 

Anyway, something's not right, and I'm guessing about the temperature because it does feel hot, especially on the base where the RAM is (not near the fan which I assume is where the CPU is). But what amazes me is how repeatable it is, if it fails to boot (just lights two leds, doesn't even get to the DELL logo), then it's 100% repeatable, by taking out the RAM and putting it back in again, it boots next time. If I do everything else (take out the power, take out the battery, turn it upside down, unscrew the cover, unclip (but DON'T take out the RAM), clip the RAM back in, shut the cover, battery in, power in, press the button), it will refuse to boot. Every time. Something about taking out the RAM and putting it back in again does something, but I've no clue what.

 

@daniewicz, what did you mean about CMOS? I've no real idea what CMOS is or how it could go bad or what the effect of it going bad would be... or how I would clear it given that it's a laptop and I've never opened the guts of it. Would CMOS failure/corruption be consistent with the weird RAM fix?

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