Comment 145 for bug 22336

Just another data point:

I'm experiencing these overheating problems on an Acer Aspire 3620 laptop. It's in stock condition, 512 MB Ram, 1.6Ghz Celeron processor. I'm running Ubunutu 6.06.1 LTS.

The laptop runs _hot_. For the first few weeks I had it, it frequently exhibited massive slowdowns that I now believe are the result of passive cooling kicking it. (It took a while to diagnose the problem.) I've taken to propping it up on a book on the left side. The intake vent is on the bottom on the right side. Raising it a half inch or so made a big difference and made the machine much more usable.

So, propped up, and using powernowd, the machine would run hot at about 78-82 degrees Celcius while idleing at the slowest speed (200 Mhz). My usual workload is pretty light, so while hot things seemed to work. However, Flash animations, especially video (say, YouTube) running full screen is the big stresser. It will quickly drive the tempurature up to 90. Extended use can drive the tempurature to 95, at which point the passive cooling makes the machine unbarably slow. Oddly enough, it doesn't seem to help the tempurature much.

I recently tried switching to the kernel's ondemand scaling. (sudo /etc/init.d/powernowd stop ; sudo sh -c 'echo -n ondemand > 'sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor' as noted repeatedly above) I can't explain why this would change anything, but the machine is idling a bit cooler, 75-78. YouTube video gets the machine up to 90-91, which is hot, but usable. Obviously this isn't a real fix; I'm pretty sure 90 degrees Celcius is bad for the machine, but it's an acceptable workaround for now. (I knew what I was getting into when I bought such a cheap machine.)

A few bits of information; I'm happy to provide more upon request.

$ cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/TZS0/cooling_mode
<setting not supported>
cooling mode: passive
$ cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/TZS0/polling_frequency
<polling disabled>
$ dmesg > /tmp/dmesg-bug
((attached))