Linux Mint Forums

I just installed Mint 13 last night. Had Mint 12 before. Some applications used to make the machine get somewhat hot (up to 200F). Now under Mint 13 the temperature is very high almost all the time. No significant CPU happening. I've turned off desktop effects to minimize it. Just running Skype will peg the temp to 200.

Doing nothing else, just idle, and with two fans on the machine, sensors reports:
Any ideas? I don't understand why the temp would be so high with no (little) CPU.

*** Additional Info

I just noticed that my machine occasionally pegs CPU with plasma-desktop running. It seems to be stuck doing something that really eats up the cpu. I even tried nicing the process, to no avail. After reaching temps exceeding 200F, I killed the plasma-desktop process and restarted it. The cpu went back down. I still need two fans to keep it running cool. Any idea why plasma would do that? This is mint 13 KDE by the way.

What kind of laptop do you have? Your temps are pretty high!

I'm also got heat problems but mine is the hard drive and not the CPU. Read the tweaks I've figured out myself Googling away here that'll also lower your CPU usage

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=90&t=114220

Try going into your Bios and see if there are any settings to help you also. Are all cores turned on? Does turning on or off "virtualization" or any of those setting changes help?

I've read there are some methods to change how Linux handles the CPU, performance...power saving..those are the pages you also need to read to see what your current settings are.

Best of luck!

You might want to try redoing the thermal paste between the CPU and the heat sink. My daughter's laptop was running over 70 degrees Celsius in Windows. There was hardly any paste when I opened it up. Cleaned the paste off and applied new stuff. Result was a drop of 30 degrees. Her laptop now runs in the 40 degree range.

Thank you both Pickles and Paul. Paul, that's an excellent idea, and being an EE (Electronics Engineer) I should have thought of that! However, it just started with the upgrade to Mint 13, so I don't think that's the problem in this case. Pickles, I'll check out those posts. There might be something my machine is doing. I've had to turn off all desktop effects, etc. to keep the cpu down. Still, the KDE "plasma-desktop" process seems to be the occasional culprit. When I see it running away, I just kill the process and restart it. There seems to be a bug, but I'm not sure what's causing it, and reports I've posted on the KDE forums suggest I might be the only one experiencing them So, I'll keep plodding along. Thanks!

Open Terminal and type "ps aux"

That shows all running processes and what percentage of the CPU / Memory those applications are using.

Look for applications eating up processor usage.

Another tool to use, open Terminal and type 'top'
Also shows you info on running processes.

Find a process you don't want running? Find it's "PID" number. Say "bluetooth-Apple" and it's PID is say 1871.

You'd use "kill -9 1871" and that shuts down process 'bluetooth-apple".

Also to trim down CPU usage, go to "Privacy", Turn off "Recording". I don't know why....but they have it recording everything thats going on.

Thanks, Pickles. I used ps already to look for anything that might be using up inordinate amounts of cpu, but nothing except an occasional plasma-desktop going through the roof (about once every 24 hours, and I kill it and restart it, but that's a completely different issue). I've already looked at the running processes, and nothing seems out of the ordinary. A few processes using 1-2% like xorg, but most processes not registering cpu percentage (because the number is below 1%). So it doesn't seem like it's a reportable process. As for "privacy" settings, I'm not sure what you're talking about. I'm running the KDE desktop, so perhaps there is no "privacy" setting here. I've looked, and nothing that suggests anything like that. Thanks, though.