Linux – Laptop running hotter on Mint than Windows

The fan

Mine does this too, running Fedora 14. Try getting a compressed can of air and blowing out the vents on the back and side of the case.

Also periodically you'll wan to remove the keyboard and blow compressed air directly on the fan's blades. They get caked with dust and start to effect its effectiveness by weighting it down.

The best thing about the Thinkpads are the service manuals! They show you how to tear down your laptop and put it back together.

• http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/guides-and-manuals/detail.page?LegacyDocID=MIGR-76853

Bad process

The other thing I've noticed is that I'll occasionally have a process that's gone awry and will be consuming 100% of one of the cores. Kill this process usually brings the temperature back to normal.

You can use htop or top to see what process this is and either kill it from their or from a terminal using it's PID.

what else?

See my answer to this U&L Q&A for more tips on how to get temperature reads for the various components of your laptop. The Q&A is titled: How to get core temperature of haswell i7 cores in i3status.

After some researches, deep in the AUR, in the world of crazy Arch developers, I found an very probable answer to the question.

As excepted, the problem comes from the use of the Open Source driver, which power management (and therefore, CPU usage/temperature) is horrible. For these reasons, and under those circumstances of mine, xf86-video-ati and friends should never be used. However, the big issue is that the catalyst package is no longer supported with Xorg 1.14. Usually, you would have to downgrade Xorg, and stop it from upgrading. I did differently.

There is the procedure I followed :

• I downloaded yaourt and its AUR dependency package-query (which requires yajl from the official repositories), and stored the tarballs in my home directory for further use.
• I reinstalled Arch Linux from scratch, because using xf86-video-ati brought a lot of dependencies to most of my applications, especially Skype and Chromium. I think that's the best thing to do to keep it clean. I kept /home away from the pacstrap installation, and re-mounted it before generating the fstab file.
• Once the system was ready (base-devel installed, configurations done), I installed package-query and yaourt, in order to download catalyst-test, the wonderful package made by our Archers. There may have been some dependencies there, I don't remember everything. Important notice : installing this package will require the re-compilation of linux kernel headers. Even if yaourt takes care of that, the computer heated up pretty high during the package compression.
• With catalyst-test installed, I followed the basic instructions for the ATI Catalyst driver (Arch Wiki) : generate the configuration with aticonfig --install, blacklist the radeon driver, make sure the fglrx module is loaded on boot (/etc/modules.load/catalyst), disable KMS (nomodeset in the kernel parameters), regenerate the GRUB configuration with grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg, reboot. At boot, make sure the fglrx module is loaded (lsmod | fglrx), and that the direct rendering is activated (fglrxinfo).
• I reinstalled my packages. Most of my configurations where untouched because I kept my /home directory away from the pacstrap process on reinstall.

With this driver, I've noticed a significant lowering of my temperatures, even if I still have some configurations to do (laptop-related issues) :

• Resetting cpupower.
• Resetting laptop-mode-tools.
• Apply powertop tunable items configuration.

A huge round of applause to the Arch Community, and thank you.