Low battery and overheating

[Ark]

Hi there everyone!

Im having a little issue with my laptop (HP nc8430). Seems it overheats way way more that it used to do in windows. Also, it runs out of battery in about 1h (vs the 3h it used to be in windows).

Any solutions? I haven't been too much with kubuntu, but i love it, now im starting toy with konsole and stuff, so i dont know really much about this...

Any help will be apreciated

[GreyGeek]

Re: Low battery and overheating

I had that problem on my Gateway m675prr laptop. My keyboard got so hot I could barely keep my fingers on the keys.

Turns out that the battery was going bad.

Turn off your laptop, unplug it, take out the battery, plug it back in order to run it from the mains, and turn it on. Run it for awhile without the battery installed to see if it runs cool, or if the CPU gets too hot. I'll wager that it will run just fine without the battery.

There's lots of internet traffic on laptop batteries getting hot and failing.

[Ark]

Re: Low battery and overheating

Tried, but nope, the overheat keeps. Also tried the same on my windows partition, and runs correctly, no overheating and much longer battery duration.

Any way to make the CPU scalate with each process? And how? (please, in 'tard mode )

[GreyGeek]

Re: Low battery and overheating

Menu -->System -->System Settings-->Advanced tab --> Power Management.

There you can change the performance settings of the CPU, etc...

[theketchupman]

Re: Low battery and overheating

Have you tried powertop yet?

I'm on an HPdv6449 on kubuntu 8.10, and it sometimes gets hot enough to lock up (so I have to power it off). If I turn on powertop (from the command line) and disable whatever it suggests to disable it seems to run a little cooler. It's really easy to use (though I haven't looked into how to make all of it's changes permanent). To install it, just "sudo apt-get install powertop".

Here's an article about it
http://www.linux-mag.com/id/6522

I'm currently trying to figure out how to disable my wired networking ethernet port (eth0), since powertop is reporting that it's causing over 150 "wakeups-from-idle per second"

I haven't tried to unplug the battery and run it without it. I have been using kubuntu on my laptops for over a year now, and had heat issues since the first kernel update to 7.10...or maybe it was 8.04, I can't remember...but I do remember it didn't have heating issues for like 3 months on an older laptop, then I updated and it's been a long time since I've been able to use my laptop without a cooling pad between it and my lap.

Sorry for my unorganized post, but I hope the powertop suggestion might shed some light on the heat problem (at least a bit of it).

[flarson]

Re: Low battery and overheating

Wow. Powertop is an education. Are you using your ethernet interface while that is happening? On my system using wifi and having no cable connected to the ethernet it reports no polling of ethernet.

[theketchupman]

Re: Low battery and overheating

No, I'm not using eth0 (I only use wireless, eth1).

[flarson]

Re: Low battery and overheating

So you do not have a cable connected and yet it is generating activity? My wireless is generating activity but that is because it is in use, and even so it is only 10.1/sec. I am using wicd instead of the kde network-manager applet. I wonder if that is the difference?


One of the things I found that I got rid of right away was the splash screen, which shows Kubuntu during boot and shutdown was generating a lot of activity so I removed splash from the defoptions in /boot/grub/menu.lst and replaced it with
defoptions=quiet usbcore.autosuspend=1
That helped a lot. Powertop is great.

[toad]

Re: Low battery and overheating

powertop is an excellent start. You may also want to check running process by examining top or even better htop - the latter allows you easy sorting of processes according to mem/cpu/you name it used.

[Ark]

Re: Low battery and overheating

Hi there again.

I have tried powerTop, wonderfull thing, is helping a lot.

Now im trying to make the CPU processors scale, i've tried to make some research on the web, but is kind of messy ...any help?

[theketchupman]

Re: Low battery and overheating

Mondo: Thanks a lot for the suggestions (esp. wicd). I have been looking for an alternative to kde4s network manager. It really is flaky, and has very little flexibility. It seemed like it was a lot more friendly in KDE3...and by friendly I mean usable. It took me more than a few minutes to figure out how to get my ESSID and encryption settings to stick.

Ark: I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "getting the processor to scale"...
When you have powertop running, does it give you multiple speeds/frequencies for the processor, and you're trying to figure out how to get it to run in the slower state? Or are you missing the multiple speeds and trying to get them to show up? (or am I really not understanding what you're asking?)