Laptop on Evan Hoffman

Why is my laptop so freaking hot?

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 14:07:07 +0000

HP Compaq nc8430, Core 2 Duo T7200 2.0GHz. Fedora Core 12 x86_64, kernel 2.6.32.19-163.fc12.x86_64 (just updated via yum).

At idle, with nothing running in the foreground, the CPU is around 70-72° Celsius, and the other sensors are 80°+. Why is this? It seems like every time I run yum update the machine gets hotter. I wonder if there’s any way to figure out what’s causing this. In any case, it’s pretty annoying. It’s uncomfortable putting the thing on my lap for any length of time.

Everything works on my laptop except Bluetooth

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:36:23 +0000

This is pretty weird. Bluetooth worked fine under Win XP. The computer is an HP/Compaq nc8430. When I go to the Bluetooth control panel I get “Your computer does not have any Bluetooth adapters plugged in.” The weird thing is, sometimes I’ll see the bluetooth logo in the taskbar at the top, but then when I look again it’s gone and I have no idea how to get it back. When I booted it up this morning I noticed the icon was there so I ran some of the debugging tools for Bluetooth and checked dmesg and this time at least it looks like at least there’s proof that Linux CAN see the Bluetooth adapter, I just don’t get why it then stops recognizing it after just a minute or two, and a reboot doesn’t even consistently bring it back.

I put Fedora Core 11 on my work laptop

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:25:19 +0000

My work laptop, which I got around the end of 2006, was starting to run like crap. Pretty sure it started around the time I put antivirus on it, which reinforces my theory that antivirus is a virus itself. Anyway, being bored with Windows XP and having already played with Windows 7 at home, I decided to install Linux. The last time I tried Linux desktop was around RedHat 7.3, which was a long time ago… pre-Fedora even. I’m pretty happy with CentOS on the server side and was set to try CentOS 5.3 on my laptop when someone suggested I go with FC due to more bleeding-edge driver support. Even though the hardware is pretty old at this point I figured it was worth a shot.