[ltp] Fan Setup

[Chris Schumann]

Richard Neill wrote:
>> Lior Uzan schrieb:
>>> I have a T61. How do i keep the fan running all the time instead of only
>>> when my pc passes a certain temp? (I don't remember if it was 50 or 52
>>> celsius)
>>> I don't like my CPU's temperature spiking whenever there's heavy load...

Most people like it when the fan is off or operates at low speed. It 
saves battery life.

> See also thinkwiki.org  for some fan-control scripts.
> 
> Actually, 52 degrees is rather conservative - you could quite safely let
> it reach 70 without hurting the chip. The low temperature is to prevent
> it burning your knees!
> 
> If you have the CPU power-management set up right, you should be able to
> enjoy near silent operation, yet without any sacrifice in performance.
> This is because a typical "desktop" load requires 100% for a few seconds
> at a time (eg when you open an application), then goes to near quiescent
> for the next minute (eg when you are typing). The fan should only
> activate when the system is seriously busy, eg updatedb, backups,
> cron-jobs, huge file-transfers,..

Opening applications, backups and file transfers do not take CPU. They 
take disk and/or network bandwidth and should not be much effort for 
anything like a T61.

Computing package dependencies, batch photo processing, audio or video 
transcoding and many games place high demands on a CPU.

I recently tried powertop and found it to be very helpful in reducing 
processor use.

Chris