Spurious thermal shutdowns on Dell Studio 1557

[Ian Smith]

On Mon, 5 Apr 2010, Bartosz Fabianowski wrote:

 > Dana Myers wrote:

 > > Agreed. I came into this thread late and admit I'm not sure what
 > > support for CPU throttling is in FreeBSD. Ideally, Notify() events on
 > > the CPU objects will cause dynamic re-evaluation of the associated
 > > _PPC object.
 > 
 > There seems to be plenty of support for throttling. But if the BIOS provides
 > bogus _PSV and _CRT values, there is only that much FreeBSD can do. That is
 > how the thread started, with the question: "How come _PSV > _CRT on my
 > machine and what should I do about it?"

Unfortunately this issue appears only to be symptomatic of a larger set 
of overheating problems with this laptop.  I googled "overheating Dell 
Studio 1557" and the results are plentiful and not at all encouraging.

I'd particularly recommend reading through the 8-page thread of the top 
hit: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=432243 .. which 
includes lots of useful info, including ways to work replacement or 
refund, and a good photo of fan and (dual) heatpipes/sinks arrangement.

Apparently models made before sometime in January had a single heat pipe 
for CPU and GPU (where GPU heat seems to be the main issue, especially 
for gamers of course) but even the January dual heat pipe redesign and a 
BIOS update seems not to have resolved issues for many.  Dell recently 
replaced the ATI GPU with another model (again, dmesg may be helpful) 
and in some cases have bumped the power supply from 90 to 130W, though 
there's little indication that these issues are yet actually solved.

cheers anyway, Ian