[ale] laptop overheats before install completes

Wed Apr 4 15:19:45 EDT 2012

I have set a laptop intake on top of a shop vac hose with the vac running
and blasted canned air in the laptop exhaust vent. What came out was a
cloud of crud that was hung on the fan blades.

I have a passive cooling pad that is nothing more than a swivel pad with
adjustable "bumps". Good airflow and less than $15.

On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 3:12 PM, Ron Frazier (ALE) <
atllinuxenthinfo at techstarship.com> wrote:

> Hi Jim,
>
> Your computer SHOULD be able to run at 100 percent capacity for an
> extended period of time without overheating.  I'll second the advice
> that Brian Mathis gave to clean the unit.  Here are some details you
> want to check.
>
> a) Make sure the fan is working at all.  It may not be on when the
> computer is cool, but should definitely come on when the computer gets hot.
> b) Make sure the fan intake, which is often on the bottom, is not
> blocked and that the machine is not sitting on a soft surface, or even a
> hard surface with no air gap.
> c) Clean any dust out of the fan intake.  I've had these intakes to get
> clogged before.  You can put a piece of wedding ribbon or other fine
> mesh over the intake to help prevent dust accumulation inside the
> machine.  Not too fine though or you'll reduce airflow too much.  Window
> screen, however is too course.  You'll have to check this intake
> periodically and clean it.
> d) Get into the bios and make sure all cooling settings are maxed out,
> set the fans to run at 100 % all the time (at least until you solve this
> problem).
> e) You may wish to get a laptop cooler pad, which has a fan, which blows
> air up toward the laptop from the base.  I have a nice unit made by
> Cooler Master, for two of my laptops that sit on a desk, that I bought
> from Frys.  It has a very large and quiet fan that blows air upward.
> Don't get a dirt cheap unit.  They have fans that are rated for less
> than a year.  Get a nice unit, like the one I mentioned, with a fan with
> BALL BEARINGS and not sleeve bearings.  Note that these don't provide
> cooling in reality, just air flow, but that might be what you need.
> f) If you open the computer up, look for the heat exchanger, which the
> fan blows through, which may be attached to a heat pipe.  Very
> carefully, clean dust out of the heat exchanger.  Note, on one of my
> machines, it had a little bitty 1" heat exchanger, with all the air
> flowing through that.  I found a glob of dust covering 3/4 of it from
> the INSIDE.  Once I cleaned that, I found that the PC would stay within
> it's thermal limits even under full load.
> g) If you remove any heat exchangers or heat pipes, make absolutely sure
> that all surfaces have a good thermal contact and seal when you put it
> back together.  You may need to add / replace thermal paste as Brian
> mentioned.  It only takes a tiny drop.
> h) Once you get the OS running, install a temperature monitoring
> software package.  This may be hard to get working depending on which
> sensors are in the PC and which drivers are in the kernel.  On Windows,
> you could use something like SpeedFan.
> i) Set the cooling settings in the OS to maximum or active cooling.  I'm
> not sure where this is in Ubuntu.  In Windows, it's in the power
> settings.  These settings won't necessarily run the fan all the time.
> However, if the system starts getting too hot, it will ramp up the fan
> prior to throttling the CPU frequency.
> j) Find out your CPU's maximum operating temperature.  This can be a
> challenge.  Let me know if you need help and I'll dig through some old
> bookmarks on the subject  Every CPU is different.  You have to find the
> data sheet for your particular model.  All my laptops have Intel chips
> and they can take around 100 degrees C.  More modern chips will
> generally throttle their speed before shutting down, but only to a
> point.  My 4 core AMD chip in my desktop can only take 62 degrees C.  I
> had to go to liquid cooling to keep it from overheating under full CPU
> load.  GPU temperature is a whole other matter.  Your laptop's cooling
> system probably is attached to both the CPU and the GPU.
> k) After you get the problem fixed and get your monitoring working, you
> may (or may not) want to stress test the system.  If you want to, get
> the Prime95 software from here:
>      http://www.mersenne.org/     This software is designed to
> calculate world record prime numbers that are important to
> mathematicians.  However, it is also a great way to stress test the
> system since it runs the CPU and memory to the max.  It doesn't do much
> with the GPU.  You should be able to run the cpu flat out at 100 percent
> without a problem overheating.  However, I wouldn't do this all the time
> because it probably shortens the life of the system.  30 minutes to 1
> hour for testing should not be a problem.
>
> Hope this helps.  If you need any assistance and I can help, I'd be glad
> to try.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Ron
>
>
> On 4/4/2012 1:22 PM, Jim Philips wrote:
> > Just trolling for possible solutions: My laptop has an ATI Radeon
> > video card. Unless the Catalyst driver is installed, it quickly starts
> > to overheat. I messed up my Ubuntu install, so now I want to
> > reinstall. But when I try, about 50% of the files get copied to disk
> > and then it slows down and finally shuts off due to overheating. This
> > wasn't a problem earlier, but I think with each thermal shutdown, the
> > laptop gets a little more susceptible to overheating. Once Catalyst is
> > installed, everything works fine. But I can only install Catalyst if I
> > complete the install of Ubuntu. Any workarounds anybody can think of?
> >
> >
>
> --
>
> (PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
> call on the phone.  I get about 300 emails per day from alternate energy
> mailing lists and such.  I don't always see new messages very quickly.)
>
> Ron Frazier
>
> 770-205-9422 (O)   Leave a message.
> linuxdude AT techstarship.com
>
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-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III

As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to
consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they
please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.
- *2011 Noam Chomsky

http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/
*
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