Ubuntu 9.04 overheats on laptop

[Oram]

Hey, I'm running Ubuntu 9.04 on my laptop. My laptop would overheat on 8.04 but not 8.10 and now in 9.04 it overheats again :S. I have a compaq cq50 110us. When ever I play any games in wine it overheats. I have tried cleaning out all of the fans and it still over heats after playing games for about 20 minutes. I'm not sure why it overheats in 9.04 but not in 8.10. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Hmm It seems to turn off when I'm doing to many things at once, I was running wine and pidgin and it turned off. I don't know if it was overheating i touched my laptop and it wasn't hot.

[Oram]

Does anyone know how to fix this? Also last time it turned off my keyboard stoped working for 10 minutes. Did this happen to anyone else?

[SeaWeedz]

having the same problem on a compaq presario f500.

on 8.10 I could throw anything at my laptop and the fan might wind up to full throttle here and there..but now, it goes to full throttle and about 5-7 minutes later the computer just powers off.

It doesn't turn on until it has cooled off. I installed a bios update (had to install and boot into Windows just to do this ) that had some bits that address the fan but it didn't help.

My temporary workaround has been to use "CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor" and run the box at 800mhz instead of 1.8ghz Will probably have to go back to 8.04.

[Cheburator]

What kind of gpu's do You have? On my compaq 6715b i have an ATI X1250, in ubuntu 9.04 it has to use the open-source drivers. On 8.10 i used the fglrx driver, temperatures on idile were about 45 C, now on the open-source drivers it runs on 55 C.

[dtoronto]

run a:

ps aux | less

to see if you have running processes that may be overworking your system. You might also need to reconfigure your bios.

[dtoronto]

you may also want to check out this thread:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=597998

It's hard to say what to do because I'm not sure what's causing it to overheat.

[SeaWeedz]

Yes.. I found out that my laptop on 8.04 and 8.10 was not overheating possibly because the CPU frequency was being adjusted accordingly.

Maybe Ondemand has a bit different algorithm now that tries to get a little more power? I speculate this because when I'd adjust the frequency manually on 9.04 I could prevent the crash.

GPU info from lspci is.. then there are many other nvidia memory controllers listed as well.

00:05.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation MCP51 PCI-X GeForce Go 6100 (rev a2)

I had added to my modules something like powernow_k7 (oops, realize now that my processor is k8) in 9.04 but still had a overheating issues. I would not be suprised if the gpu was causing the problem..and maybe setting the CPU freq to 800mhz was enough to slow everything down to prevent overheating.

I switched back to 8.04 and haven't had any crashes from overheating. I do have 9.04 on a harddrive here still so I can try testing things out if it would help.

I've been seeing some other overheating reports for 9.04 as well
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1136575
http://swiss.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1134717
http://wedontsupportyou.com/2009/04/14/cooling-off/

Should I try powernow_k8 in the modules to see if it helps?

[martinbures]

I am having the exact same problem. I am on a macbook pro santa rosa.

I am not gaming. I just installed 9.04 - I was running 8.10 previously just fine. I walked out of the room while it was sitting there with no programs loaded after booting. It is very tempermental about finding wifi and for some reason refused to connect. I left the room for 5 minutes and came back and it was boiling.

[SeaWeedz]

martin: boiling.. Try running dtorontos command sometime when it is hot. Did it crash or power down, or just hot to the touch (more than other times you have used it?)

The way you describe it, I'm imagining a seemingly idle computer getting very hot.

[martinbures]

That is exactly it. I finished installing everything. I then ran update manager. After that was done, I got up to change some laundry, came back and touched it became very alarmed and immediately shut it down. I do a lot of scientific programming on it and heavy data crunching. It NEVER got anywhere near this hot when I was doing serious work on it. When I get home tonight I will try what you said.

martin.