I have an old laptop prone to overheating and a good solution I found was limiting it's CPU usage to below 50%.
On Windows, I can do this by changing the power plan I am currently using, and altering the Minimum CPU Usage and and Maximum CPU Usage properties.
Where can I do something similar on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS?
You can use cgroups to control how various system resources are allocated.
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/cgroups/cgroups.txt
Now set some parameters that are available for tuning:
sudo echo 1000 > /sys/fs/cgroup/cpu.cfs_period_us
sudo echo 500 > /sys/fs/cgroup/cpu.cfs_quota_us
Which means "for every 1000 microseconds, allow the / cgroup to consume 500 microseconds of cpu."
More info:
The commands above are from memory (I'm at home on Mac now), but they give the general idea.
Once you are able to see that indeed cpu is limited to 50% (using top for example to view), then it's left as an exercise for the reader to make these changes persistent.
Follow these steps to limit the CPU usage and hence decrease temperature.
Step 1 : Download the script file from the following link:
https://github.com/Sepero/temp-throttle/archive/master.zip.
Extract the zip file
Step 2 : Start the terminal and mount the extracted folder and then run the command
sudo ./temp_throttle.sh 80
It's done.
cpulimit