[ale] laptop overheats before install completes

[Ron Frazier (ALE)]

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
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mailing lists and such.  I don't always see new messages very quickly.)

Ron Frazier

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