I have a Dell XPS 15 9500. I have been happily using 18.04 but keep getting told I need to update to 20.04. I've upgraded, but now the fan seems to be running high pretty much all the time, even when the computer is doing nothing / asleep.
Is there anything I can do about this?
ps auxc | grep -i therm root 166 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? I< 20:00 0:00 acpi_thermal_pm root 930 0.0 0.0 126260 9384 ? Ssl 20:00 0:00 thermald dpkg -l thermald Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold | Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend |/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad) ||/ Name Version Architecture Description +++-==============-================-============-==============================> ii thermald 1.9.1-1ubuntu0.6 amd64 Thermal monitoring and control> I don't have lm-sensors or vitals but I can install them if that will help.
2 Answers
Coming a bit late to the party, but you may want to fine-tune your /etc/thermald/thermal-conf.xml configuration file...
Also, lm-sensors will probably be quite useful too.
I have a dell like your and fan goes crazy when CPU is heavily used. Playing videos, games, or any application CPU intensive would make the fans go high, making a lot of noise, and drain the battery even if I have a 135W professional charger. For avoiding that I try to not have processes so much CPU hungry and I also discovered that dust accumulated on the bottom of the laptop, in the air entrance. (So it was not entirely a Software thing, the laptop really got overheat as air flow was not working well). I removed the dust and made sure that the air entrance in the bottom of the laptop was separated few cms from the metal base (I have metal floating arm to move the laptop and a monitor, and the base was making the laptop to cover partially the air flow entrance). After that, things improved a lot.
May be not the software line that you was expecting but I hope this helps.
