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I recently installed 14.04 on my Toshiba Satellite 305D. It has an AMD Athlon X2 Duel-core and 2GB of ram with Radeon 3100. I know she's not much, but I'm a Peace Corps Volunteer living in West Africa and she's all I got.

It's been overheating super quickly and shutting itself down. I've had this trouble with Ubuntu before but it's a bit worse this time round. I duel-boot Windows 7 and never have this trouble with it. I imagine it may be something wrong with recognizing my graphics, but I can't find any good advice about what exactly to do about that.

Admittedly, I'm an Ubuntu noob. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Mike Underwood
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5 Answers5

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I'm also using a Toshiba Satellite model and had laptop heating issues recently. I suspected it was due to CPU running at very high speeds. I installed the indicator-cpufreq that allows you to set your CPU profile and almost always kept it in powersave mode (It gives you an indicator in the top ubuntu panel):

sudo apt-get install indicator-cpufreq

Since then, not only was my heating problem solved, but the fan noise also disappeared as a bonus!

Prahlad Yeri
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    This worked well. Cleaning the fan is always a great go-to, but living where I do makes that a bit difficult. It's running about 25 degrees cooler. – Mike Underwood Jul 05 '14 at 17:13
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In addition to using ìndicator-cpufreq to switch to a lower performance CPU profile, you can try your luck with thermald, which is a daemon that prevents machines from overheating and was introduced in 14.04. Install by:

sudo apt-get install thermald

After install you either have to start the daemon manually or just reboot. You can find more information on thermald for instance here or there.

I'm using thermald successfully on an i5 Core ThinkPad, which apparently did not use all available fans by default, and was randomly shutting down without thermald due to overheating.

bluenote10
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You can also use tlp, but it is little advanced

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:linrunner/tlp
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install tlp tlp-rdw

ThinkPads require an additional:

sudo apt-get install tp-smapi-dkms acpi-call-dkms

what you can do with tlp ?

Processor and Frequency Scaling(you can set whether your laptop runs in powersaver or performance or ondemand mode. also you can allow whether your processor uses turbo boost or not)
and much more, visit the official page (link above)

Alex Jones
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you need to clean it up here or you can limit your CPU usage this is how limit cpu usage I suggest the cleaning it's the best solution

Ahmed Ali
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hwez
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Uninstall Adobe Flash Player or make its plugins'(shockwaveflash) in browsers "ask to activate" .

This will solve restart / shutdown while viewing videos in Youtube.com. Youtube will use HTML5 Player instead.

Note : Random shutdown of Ubuntu happened for me daily on youtube videos and flash player games (chesscube.com).

I tried CPU frequency powersave mode, thermald, tlp, etc., in Ubuntu 16.04 and always kept Ubuntu updated. Cleaned fan vents. None stopped random shutdown.

In past few weeks had no random shutdown or restarts in Ubuntu 16.04 after making Adobe Flash Player inactive. Also not had any shutdown while using Adobe Flash Player in Firefox through WINE for long hours

I am using Intel® Pentium(R) CPU B960 @ 2.20GHz × 2 Processor and Intel® Sandybridge Mobile Graphics.

I read that Adobe releases updates for Flash Player for Linux only in respect of security updates and has stopped Flash Player development for Linux years ago. See below link

Adobe will stop releasing new versions of Flash - what will happen to flash support in Ubuntu?

Community
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oppili
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  • While Flash Player is known to require a lot of processing power on occasion, more recent versions have done a great deal to shift the bulk of the computation during video decoding onto the GPU. In my experience Flash Player requires less CPU cycles than the “native” decoders in Firefox and Chromium to play back some videos. (I still don't like to use Flash Player but for entirely different reasons.) – David Foerster Sep 17 '16 at 09:30