[Solved]: Laptop overheating with Mint 19.3

[tonygraziano]

Temperature is lowind down, even if ventilation is still running.

Code: Select all

coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Package id 0:  +64.0°C  (high = +87.0°C, crit = +105.0°C)
Core 0:        +59.0°C  (high = +87.0°C, crit = +105.0°C)
Core 1:        +57.0°C  (high = +87.0°C, crit = +105.0°C)

[Dark Owl]

Have you checked out your laptop's cooling? I know you know the fan is running, but laptops typically have heat pipes from the CPU to a radiator in the exhaust from the low-profile fan. The radiator fins get blocked with dust and fluff over time, and definitely benefit from being cleaned out (although it can be quite an intense process to get to it).

Plug your exact model into Google and there is often a strip-down YouTube video to be found.

(Edited for minor corrections)

[freshminted]

My Dell 9400 ran increasingly hot over the years until I blew compressed air through the fan grills. Was blown away (ha!) by the amount of gunk that came out. It ran at 20-40C after that, was getting up to 80/90C before.

The fans became very noisy over the years, now I can't stand them and the 9400 is close to retirement. Replaced with a RoG beast (son's gaming cast-off).

[Petermint]

Fans are like disks. Rotate, wear, repeat. Replace. Instead of disks death from sliding off a desk onto the floor, your fan chokes from human, dog, cat, horse hair, dandruff, the dust that falls of cakes, and the pollen from the trees overhead.

My laptop has an easy opening back with about 11 screws you remove. One is a Tork 7. I can then access memory for an upgrade (I added a second stick), disk (bigger SSD), battery (to get another 3 years of use), and the fan. Easy.

A friend had a rotating rust storage device fail and I stupidly offered to replace it. Doh! On top of the MicroStuffup problems, the hardware was built in layers with the bits you need to access at the bottom. Every layer is held in place by plastic by plastic tabs that break off from you just breathing on them. Every layer has complicated delicate cables to the next layer. I needed fingers less than 2mm wide to reach in. I am surprised I lived through the stress.

If I had that model and the fan clogged up, I would sell it on ebay as a laptop with a special hand warming keypad.

[Dark Owl]

The fans became very noisy over the years

Yes, and sometimes intermittently noisy.

I run a HP61. The fan was noisy (at times), and I bought in a replacement. When I came to do the job, actually replacing the fan was going to be tricky but I found a clean out and a drop of oil was all it needed.

That particular HP61 got dropped for me and smashed a USB port, and I acquired another (higher spec) HP61 on eBay as "broken" hoping to combine the two. In fact, the "new" one was fine except for a keyboard cap popped off, which takes a bit of patience to replace properly, so I just "moved in" by swapping HDDs. Windows complained a bit, but I sorted that.

Now the fan on this one is noisy... I have a job to do (and a spare fan if I need it).

Incidentally, the fans in these are not the typical axial fan PC builders might be used to. They are radial (centrifugal) fans with shrouds specifically designed to fit in the particular laptop.

[tonygraziano]

I solved the issue
After installing Mint Tricia I cleaned the fan. They wer full of ball of dust (7 years without cleaning that). Now it goes well
Thank you so much

[Dark Owl]

As luck would have it, yesterday my Windows notebook went on a go-slow, and the exhaust felt very hot. I had an identical notebook previously (HP G61), which once required a de-fluff, and I ordered a replacement fan "just in case" but didn't use it.

This time the fan felt quite stiff, which I could probably overcome by cleaning out the bearing, but I switched in the new part anyway. Hoovered the heat pipe fins too, which were dusty but not too bad.

The operation also required a smear of thermal paste when replacing the heat sink / heat pipe / fan assembly, so anyone wanting to do the same thing should ensure they have some before starting.

[carum carvi]

I solved the issue
After installing Mint Tricia I cleaned the fan. They wer full of ball of dust (7 years without cleaning that). Now it goes well

Learned a good lesson today. I always thought that fan noise was a hardware compatibility problem with Linux (which it often can be), but I must remember that simple DUST can be the real culprit as well. I never dare open my 12 old computer, that is quite heavy on the fan noise as well, but this post and the original poster's success story has me convinced of the negative effect of simple DUST. I googled the definition of dust, but I liked the description by Petermint better:

Fans are like disks. Rotate, wear, repeat. Replace. Instead of disks death from sliding off a desk onto the floor, your fan chokes from human, dog, cat, horse hair, dandruff, the dust that falls of cakes, and the pollen from the trees overhead.

[Dark Owl]

Fans are like disks. Rotate, wear, repeat. Replace.

Note that a noisy or stiff fan can often be recovered with application of a little persistence. The rotor is the only moving part, and there are no motor brushes or commutator to wear out. So long as the embedded drive electronics are still working (still able to spin the magnetic rotor), and nothing is physically broken, it's just a question of whether the bearing is worn or merely dirty.

The rotor is only held in place magnetically, and once pulled off the spindle (be brave, it needs quite a tug) crud can be cleaned out of the bearing, a touch of light grease (eg Vaseline) applied, and it's good as new (having cleaned the rest of it, obviously).

I only replaced my notebook fan because I happened to have a spare one handy (and I might never find another use for it).

[ps-mint]

I had the same problem, however not when upgrading to Mint 19.3 but when updating the kernel from 4.15 to 5.x (under LM 19.3). After the update the laptop was overheated and the fans run constantly. The noise was very annoying. Curiously only on power supply, on battery everything was fine. I tried at least 4 different kernels from the 5.3 and 5.4 series but nothing helped. I changed back to 4.15 and everything was fine again.

Note, that it's a relatively new MSI laptop with SSD, NVMe, GeForce 1060, etc. So I don't really understand