Laptop gets so hot. Why?

[JacksonW]

valemon, I couldn't get acpi -t to work. Like I said, I'm a newb

[devils casper]

casper, after switching to the vesa driver, I found that the laptop cooled down quite a bit. It seems to me that the driver support for my video chipset must be what's causing this. Unfortunately, I went to the ati website, and linux drivers are only supported from the radeon 8200 and up, whereas my card is a 7500. I don't really wand to settle with the idea that I'm crap out of luck just yet, are there any third party drivers for my adapter floating around?

ATI hasn't released code of their driver and third party drivers are not available coz of that. vesa driver works fine in most of machines but it doesn't support 3D effects.

[devils casper]

valemon, I couldn't get acpi -t to work. Like I said, I'm a newb

It means, either you havn't installed acpi package or its been disabled. Did you use acpi=off option during installation?
You should can leave it as it is.

[JacksonW]

Damn. I probably wouldn't have used desktop effects, or I might have just switched to ubuntu and used the normal effects. I really like this T40, it's thin, doesn't get hot(in xp of course I mean), and gets great battery life. If I could just run it well in linux.

This is actually the third attempt to install linux on a laptop, where I've run into a problem big enough for me to not want to run linux on the laptop. I have a crappier laptop(gateway mx3215), this t40, and my friend's HP. Do you know of a laptop that will run linux as well or better than xp? If there are none out there, maybe I should just splurge and get a higher end xps one of these days...

[Linux-Cypher]

Get you a copy of XANDROS desktop! The GUI is very clean and it will keep your laptop cooler! Acpi works great! It did for my T40! and a dell D600! my ati radeon 9200 works good!

[JacksonW]

Did your t40 have a 7500 or a 9000?

[JacksonW]

Update.

After more usage using the vesa display driver, the laptop continued to heat up. I decided to take another look under the whole case(instead of just the keyboard) and find out exactly what I was feeling on the motherboard that was burning the lower bottom of my laptop.

I found it was the PCI southbridge. And with that, I am now completely lost.

[Calhil]

I think that the only way you can get your laptop to consume less energy and thus produce less heat is to compile your own kernel with power saving options enabled.
You can also check www.less-watts.org for some patches and tips ;]

[JacksonW]

Thanks for the reply!

After checking out the website(I might add it was actually LessWatts.org - Saving Power on Intel systems with Linux), I found quite a few things I would like to try, probably next few days I get off. A lot of that has me pretty hopeful! =)

Thanks again, can't wait to play with the downloads

[Calhil]

Sorry for the wrong address.
Here's another useful page How to reduce power consumption - ThinkWiki