[sf-lug] hardware blues

[Eric Walstad]

On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 12:40 PM,  <aaleksey at ucla.edu> wrote:
> In my closet rests a [Clevo M570RU clone] Sager NP5790 with a dead [NVIDIA
> 7900GTX] video card and what seems to me to be an iffy power supply (I think
> it's the power supply anyway, as the computer will randomly turn off
> depending on whether or not it's connected to its charger).
There's an issue with some laptops running some versions of Ubuntu[0]
that appear to have these same symptoms.  I had an older ThinkPad A31
running Jaunty shut itself down when under heavy load because the CPU
got too hot[1].  In my case, the CPU fan was running too slowly.  I
installed an older version of Ubuntu (Hardy: Ubuntu 8.04.3 LTS) and
all is well.  I wrote a simple Python script[2] to log temperatures[3]
so that I could verify that my laptop was experiencing the thermal
shutdown under heavy load.

HTH,

Eric.
[0] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/370173
[1]
Sep 9 22:16:12 mentawai kernel: [40329.165064] ACPI: Critical trip point
Sep 9 22:16:25 mentawai exiting on signal 15
[2] http://launchpadlibrarian.net/31620435/log_temperatures.py
[3] http://launchpadlibrarian.net/31620230/temperature.log