[SOLVED]10+ yr old dell laptop overheating

[dandelioneater]

I'm running an old dell latitude c2duo laptop w/ 32-bit 12.10 ubuntu (see sytem spec) and on occasion when playing videos on youtube the video will become very choppy and unwatchable. If I have a few applications open even the desktop will seem sluggish when minimizing windows and that sort of thing. I'm assuming that the video card is overheating. The bottom of the laptop is rather warm. Will replacing TIM on the heatsinks help? Ill blow out any dust as well while I am at it.

[frontier204]

C2Ds didn't exist 10 years ago Conroe (microprocessor) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Laptops always get warm, especially that era of notebook, so you will want to actually check if it's temps. Ubuntu 12.10 is abnormally demanding on hardware, to the point where you NEED 3D acceleration for its desktop - try Ubuntu on a virtual machine with no acceleration on any CPU you want to see what I'm talking about.

Under Ubuntu, there's a package lm-sensors that you can use:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SensorInstallHowto

If the temps are OK, you may want to try a "lighter" GUI like LXDE or XFCE.
LXDE: sudo apt-get install lubuntu-desktop
XFCE: sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop

[dandelioneater]

Yeah i'll have a go with lm-sensors to confirm the temps. Thanks

[Bond007]

My guess is temps. Either the heat sink is clogged and needs cleaning and/or the thermal paste is now useless.

[dandelioneater]

I bet the OEM TIM is probably hard as a rock. I'll probably open her up tonight and have a look. It looks as though the whole bottom panel will come off and my guess expose all the boards and heatsinks.

[dandelioneater]

Well I opened her up and had a look. She was in pretty bad shape. Cleaned the Heatsink and fan and removed the old TIM. THe paste was rock hard on the NVidia chip and had deteriorated. Replaced with Arctic Silver 5. Now I can barely hear the fan spinning up. It's a night and day difference. I installed lm-sensors and it shows the cpu temps go from 30 at idle to 65 while watching a video. The fan is barely audible - I thought I had forgotten to plug it into the mainboard for a minute.


Lm-sensors didn't detect the sensor for the nvidia gpu. I'll have to maybe look into that later. So far I haven't experienced any lag on the desktop.

[dandelioneater]

I was experimenting with the LXDE desktop environment today to address the UNITY desktop screen lag issues I still have on this old laptop. It was alright - very plain and slightly less user friendly coming from UNITY. For the heck of it I gave ''cinnamon'' a shot and really like it. Cinnamon is alot easier to use than UNITY and seems to be alot more snappy. I don't have any lag when using the desktop right now. Cinnamon must not have the same animations/effects that require hardware acceleration like in UNITY. Anyways, my Laptop is purring right now.

[Bond007]

Glad to hear it was the common laptop killer that can be relatively easily fixed...heat