[ltp] 390E Generic questions unrelated to salmon

[Bert Haskins]

Helen Borrie wrote:

> Hello 390E owners,
>
> Please, would someone tell me what the slider at the very top of the 
> keyboard console is for?  It is located to the right of the indicator 
> LEDs for battery and suspend mode. 

It is to control lcd brightness.
If it does not make any difference on your machine, the sliding button 
has come up off of the
button on the potentiometer or the 'pot' is broken.
This is not a really rare occurrence on the 390s.
Remember that you can set the brightness range in the F1 options.

>
>
> How does one get out of Suspend mode?  My machine has a habit of going 
> into suspend when it gets a bit warm...

I have never seen this on any of my 390s.
Is the fan working?
You should hear it startup and run for a short time when the 390 is 
booting up.
It is not uncommon for the fan blades to me so full of !@#$ that the fan 
will not work well.

> .all I can do at the moment is switch it off, resulting in the need 
> for a fs check when it's rebooted.  My "production" notebook (a 1.5 
> GHz Highlander) comes out of suspend with a Fn sequence (the same 
> sequence that can be used to put it into suspend) but that doesn't 
> seem to work with the 390E. 

Tapping the Fn key works for me.

>
>
> Related, what are some tricks (other than what I do now) to reduce the 
> tendency for the machine to get too hot when, say, it's reading from 
> the CDROM or a pen-drive?

Is the bottom of the 390 really warm when it shuts down?
If so, the fan system is not working properly.
If not the heat sink system is not working properly or you have a heat 
sensitive part... cpu?
Once again, I have never seen one of these shutdown or misbehave due to 
heat and I doubt if
any one has worked their machine harder than I have.
The bottom of the laptop does get warm enough to be uncomfortable on my 
lap so I do
often put something between  the unit and my legs.
FWIW On a few of my 390X boxes I have swapped out the original MMC-2 cpu 
unit
for a 600... 750.
I have not been able to run at the higher clock speed because of lack of 
support in the bios
but the decrease in heat and the longer battery life are both very! 
noticeable and
well worth the cost and effort of making the swap.

> What I do now is to use it on a lapramp - for those who don't know, 
> www.lapramp.com.au.  Do I need to run some fans underneath?  The 
> Highlander (also on a lapramp) never runs hot enough to cut out, even 
> in the very hot summers we have here.
>
> Thanks for any advice.
> Helen
>