Ubuntu runnung painfully slow and hot on laptop

Question

I just installed Ubuntu 12.10 and my laptop gets really really high temperatures (havent measured yet but it is like if it was running a demanding game) and runs painfully slow after a couple of minutes of use, freezing from time to time until it freezes completely and i have to shut down.

Im also running Windows and that works fine, fast and cold, so there must be a solution for Ubuntu better.

Specs: hp dv6-6185la -intel i7-2630QM -AMD Radeon 6770M (switchable graphics) -6GB Ram -750 HDD (5400rpm)

Answer 1

My laptop is almost identical to yours and installing the standard Catalyst drivers did not fix the problems with the fan and temperatures. (In fact, it caused a new problem of booting into low graphics mode.)

This is because the Catalyst drivers currently have problems with the switchable graphics. The problems with the fan and temperatures were fixed only after following the instructions at: Workaround for Radeon Switchable Graphics in the Ubuntu Community Documentation.

Here are the instructions:

1) First open a terminal window. You can use ctrl + alt + t

2) Then copy and paste the following commands one at a time into the terminal. Press Enter after each command. To paste into a terminal window, right click and use the paste command from the context menu or click the mouse wheel or middle button. (Note that ctrl + v will not work.)

sudo apt-get purge fglrx*
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:andrikos/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y upgrade
sudo apt-get --reinstall install xserver-xorg-video-intel
sudo apt-get -y install fglrx-updates fglrx-amdcccle-updates
sudo aticonfig --initial -f

3) After the first command, you will be prompted for your password.

4) When you are finished, you will need to reboot.

As an aside, it's apparently common for the brightness controls to not work out of the box with HP DV6. If you find this is the case on your laptop, see: Brightness not working on HP DV6