[ltp] Cooling/ACPI issues on Thinkpad a21m

[pzalac]

The other day, I purchased this used laptop from a used laptop dealer.  
Apparently it used to be used by some corporation and now they're using 
dell's (the fools!).. anyways, I acquired it for a fair price and now am the 
mostly happy owner of an IBM thinkpad a21m running arklinux.  

EVERYTHING thats built into the laptop works.  The modem, the thinkpad buttons 
took a little more work (didn't have kmilo installed) but now thats working, 
suspend works, I simply have to plug in my ethernet plug and ethernet works 
almost automagically, the speed is reasonably quick even with kde 3.4, 
running quite a few apps and using kernel 2.6.11-1.  Sound works flawless, 
it's just a wonderful laptop.  Aside from ACPI and the fact that the CPU 
*will* heat up past 92 degrees celcius and automatically shut down, if im 
compiling a kernel or using kynaptic to update packages (strangely, just 
using apt-get doesn't heat the processor up as much)

I'm using the stock kernel that comes with arklinux 2005.1 , which was just 
released last week.  the /proc/acpi directory does not list anything 
in /proc/acpi/fan, and /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THM0/cooling_mode and 
trip_points both list the cooling mode as passive, nothing I do can switch it 
to active.   At this point, I had decided, hey, maybe the fan isn't working.  
at which point I disassembled the laptop and, yes it is working.  and between 
the fan and the cpu is some sort of thermal paste, as can be expected.

At this point I thought I should send an email to the list, but I was still 
unsatisfied with what I'd learned.  I figured I'd try to configure CPU 
throttling , and see if that keeps the processor from overheating.  I had the 
processor at around 650mhz and for the most part was able to compile and 
configure... still, I'd rather have as much processing power as possible on 
this laptop.  In any case, for some reason after rebooting, I can no longer 
mess with the cpu throttling and its stuck in /proc/cpuinfo at 796.571mhz.  
this I find peculiar as well.

Should I take it back to the place where I got it and have them take a look at 
the fan?  they did say they have a 60 day hardware warranty.  Should I try 
using a different kernel or updating the acpi drivers?  the IBM Thinkpad ACPI 
Extras driver is version 0.8.  I have to say if i can figure out this issue 
this laptop will be a dream to work on.   (especially if they have dvd 
burners that fit in the ultradrive bay.. i know they have the cd-rw's)  Any 
help or input would be appreciated.  thanks for listening.   I've been using 
linux for years and this is the first time I've ever felt forced to ask 
something on a mailing list :)