Dne sobota 11 april 2009 ob 15:22:38 je Douglas A. Tutty napisal(a): > On Sat, Apr 11, 2009 at 02:26:30PM +0200, Aleksa ??u??uli?? wrote: > > The laptop is less than a year old and still in warranty. It has never > > been used in dusty or dirty places. And this overheating only happens > > with Debian (installing OpenSuSE or Mandriva or Ubuntu or Fedora works a > > breeze). The only other instance it does happen is when my current > > OpenSuSE system freezes (stops responding), ramping up the CPU to 100% > > usage: if I don't switch to a virtual terminal and reboot within, say, 10 > > minutes, the laptop will shut itself off from overheating. Hence my > > assumption that the machine simply is not DESIGNED to work at full > > throttle (100% CPU usage) for any length of time. But I may be wrong, of > > course. > > > > As a sidenote: I've found a thread on internet a while ago stating that > > you may risk overheating and even frying a laptop if you try installing > > Windows98 as a virtual machine, since Windows98 does not support the CPU > > "idle" instruction. I assume something vaguely similar may be going on > > here. Modern laptops with fairly powerful CPUs apparently rely on certain > > subsystems of the OS to effectively prevent overheating. If some of those > > subsystems don't work as expected, overheating will occur. I find it hard > > to believe there aren't more laptop users with this sort of problems... > > So they install a powerful CPU for the marketers to get you to drool > over, then don't provide the necessary cooling so that when you > actualluy _use_ the CPU power, the unit fails. > > I'd call it a design flaw and return the unit. > > Doug.
I agree ... to a point. Namely, I've never managed to overheat the unit by just _using_ the CPU. It exclusively happens: 1) during a Debian Lenny installation 2) during a certain type of system lock-up which forces both the CPU frequency and its usage to go to 100%. I'd compare (if I may) the situation with a car having, say, a range of 0 to 7000 RPM, of which only 2000 to 5000 is actually the "working range". Now, forcing the car in a very low gear and running it at a constant 7000 RPM, how many minutes until the engine overheats? And, more importantly: how _stupid_ should one be to actually try doing this at home? It's, in my opinion, what's happening here: some runaway process or OS flaw simply ramps up the CPU to a regime that wasn't intended to be used for a prolonged time in the first place. In normal usage, leaving a CPU running at 100% usage is a rare occurence (I'm not talking about CPU frequency here, I'm talking about CPU usage - 100% meaning no idle cycles whatsoever over several minutes or even hours!). -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
