Ubuntu Linux Help

Does a loud, constant CPU fan on your laptop drive you nuts? Try this simple tweak before more drastic measures…

Try scaling down your CPU frequency: Clock scaling allows you to change the clock speed of CPUs on the fly. This is a nice method to save battery power on notebooks, because the lower the clock speed, the less power the CPU consumes.

To do this you’ll need to insert the p4_clockmod module:

sudo modprobe p4_clockmod

This shouldn’t return any output.

Now, add the line

p4_clockmod

to “/etc/modules” to ensure the CPU clock scaling module starts with the system.

Now, to add the CPU frequency scaling monitor applet to the panel, right click over an empty area in the panel, select ‘add to panel’, and select the CPU frequency applet. Hopefully it’ll pop up showing the CPU frequency now. Reboot your laptop if it doesn’t seem to be working immediately.

Finally, if you (like I did) get miffed off with the laptop ‘lagging’ when needing a quick boost of power, you can manually set the frequency you want it to run at. Sometimes 250Mhz just isn’t enough!

sudo cpufreq-selector -f 1000000

Would set the CPU frequency to 1GHz - Easy eh?
There you have it, CPU frequency scaling in 5 minutes

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