How do I fix an overheating problem with an HP ENVY-4 ultrabook?

Question

I have bought a new HP ENVY-4 ultrabook. It has an i5 processor, pre-installed Windows 7 and 2GB Radeon graphics card. What happened was when I started using Ubuntu it showed overheating.

I ignored it but after a few days it burnt my laptop battery to 0% capacity. It was just one month old so I got the battery replaced for free. I tried installing Linux Mint but it also showed overheating. I tried Fedora 17 but it didn't install correctly. On Windows it is running perfectly fine and it's not even heating a bit.

Can someone please suggest what the problem with Ubuntu is and possible solutions? I am a computer science guy so I can't work without Linux and this machine is then like a waste for me.

Answer 1

Check powertop to see if you're reaching the deeper idle states, if you can't reach them then that's part of the problem. The next big problem is video, if you're not already running a proprietary video driver, get one, they have advanced power management that the opensource drivers don't even come close to. If your laptop has both discrete and integrated video see if you can disable the discrete, the Intel opensource video drivers are very good power wise.

http://lesswatts.org/projects/powertop/powertop.php

Video and CPU is where the most heat is dissipated, everything is irrelevant in comparison.