[freshwire]

Compressed air will be good if used regularly (blowing with the mouth yeah!)

If however you have lots of dust built up (on the other side of the vent trying to get out) then you can still have problems. If possible I would suggest just opening it up and removing dust build up. It will tend to be clumped up so compressed air won't always help.

Also (again if possible) you can replace the thermal compound between the CPU and the heat sink.



You can see the wall of dust in this photo. Sometimes it will be so compacted it will come out in one piece!

If you are not confident taking the laptop apart then lowering the clock rate will help (as described above by Myatu).

[Myatu]

Another thing which might help as a temporary measure (at least to make the laptop usable) is to use cpufrequtils. With it you can lower the CPU speed (without having to muck about in the BIOS), and so keep it a bit cooler.

You can install that with apt-get install cpufrequtils cpufreqd. Basic information about the current CPU governor and speed can be obtained with cpufreq-info. For example, on my laptop, the first CPU core gives:

analyzing CPU 0:
  driver: acpi-cpufreq
  CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 0 1
  CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 0
  maximum transition latency: 10.0 us.
  hardware limits: 800 MHz - 1.47 GHz
  available frequency steps: 1.47 GHz, 1.07 GHz, 800 MHz
  available cpufreq governors: conservative, ondemand, userspace, powersave, performance
  current policy: frequency should be within 1.47 GHz and 1.47 GHz.
                  The governor "performance" may decide which speed to use
                  within this range.
  current CPU frequency is 1.47 GHz.
  cpufreq stats: 1.47 GHz:18.01%, 1.07 GHz:1.68%, 800 MHz:80.30%  (6442548)

Essentially I could force it to run at 800 Mhz only, which for diagnostics should be just fine - better than things shutting down on you at least!

There's a Wiki that explains it, which should also work for Debian: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_use_cpufrequtils

Hope this might help you a bit

[jonlewi5]

Nvidia card?
if yes try latest drivers ...

Nope, Its an ATI card.

Ill have a check tonight what drivers its using.

cheers.

[yonatan]

A little update

Well iv blasted laptop with compressed air, cleaned it all etc.

It is still shutting down, just out of interest, what sort of running temp would you expect?

jon@debian:~$ uptime
 22:54:04 up 28 min,  2 users,  load average: 0.02, 0.06, 0.09
jon@debian:~$ acpi -t
     Battery 0: Charging, 59%, 01:10:13 until charged, design capacity 4400 mAh
     Thermal 0: ok, 80.0 degrees C
     Thermal 1: ok, 87.0 degrees C
jon@debian:~$

Nvidia card?
if yes try latest drivers ...

[fozl]

compressed air, never heard of that trick?

I seen a fat bloke once using it to blow the crumbs out his keyboard though... lol

Great for cleaning D/SLRs and computers.

[jonlewi5]

Yeah mine shutsdown at 99C.

The fan is all working, i can hear it firing up.
Unfortunately lm sensors doesnt want to work so cant see what they are running at.

The only other thing i guess i can do is new thermal paste, but i dont really fancy pulling it apart as its insured.

[Myatu]

I'm generally running between 55-71 C. My laptop will shut down at 90 C. Yours seems close to that. Does it have a fan (which works)?

[jonlewi5]

A little update

Well iv blasted laptop with compressed air, cleaned it all etc.

It is still shutting down, just out of interest, what sort of running temp would you expect?

jon@debian:~$ uptime
 22:54:04 up 28 min,  2 users,  load average: 0.02, 0.06, 0.09
jon@debian:~$ acpi -t
     Battery 0: Charging, 59%, 01:10:13 until charged, design capacity 4400 mAh
     Thermal 0: ok, 80.0 degrees C
     Thermal 1: ok, 87.0 degrees C
jon@debian:~$

[jonlewi5]

to be honest iv heard of it, never ever uesd it though, and it really didnt come to mind.

ahh iv seen people turn keyboards upside down and have a mountain of dead skin and god knows what drop out of it. Pretty damn nasty!

EDIT
Yeah can confirm its overheating now.
Just turned itself off while using it (managed to evenutally get debian installed by only installing basic packages etc) and as i turned it back on, it went back off but just before it going off a message flashed up saying critical temperature reached

[RapidSpeeds]

compressed air, never heard of that trick?

I seen a fat bloke once using it to blow the crumbs out his keyboard though... lol

[jonlewi5]

awesome, cheers myatu!!

ill grab some compressed air tomorrow.
Yeah i tried in text only mode aswell but same happened, its weird that it only happens during an o/s installation not during normal use :/

[Myatu]

Very often with random shutdowns is that the laptop is overheating. A can of compressed air (and only air!) down the vents will do the trick. Just make sure to power it down completely (unplug it and take out battery), and wait a minute or 2 after using the air before powering it back on (due to some condensation / ice crystals). I do this every 3-4 months or so, and keeps it cool and quiet.

As for logs, check the usual location of /var/logs. You'll be getting that error if the installation hasn't completed though. One other thing you could try is text-mode only installation (in case you use a Live CD with a GUI). It's less CPU/GPU intensive.

[jonlewi5]

seeing as there is a lot of linux savvy people here, i figured id try here

Basicly, im in the process of reformating my laptop, was dual booting xp (for itunes) and debian, but i wanted to start fresh with just debian.
As debian is being installed, my laptop is turning itself off..
It happens randomly not whilst installing a certain package, its just whenever. This doesnt just happen for debian, it happens with windows aswell.

I think the laptop is overheating, does debain make any logs during the installation i could check to be sure?
If i boot the laptop up after it has crashed, i get a GRUB - filesystem unknown error.

Cheers