Why? Never seen this happen before. I’m using the blank screen saver.
4436time wrote:
> Why? Never seen this happen before…
“not in use” as in unpowered/shutdown/not operating?
or hibernating/suspended?
or fully operating but you are not touching the keyboard/mouse ?
which DE/OS and what kind of hardware…
–
palladium
It cycles when on and sitting idle, not while in use. I’ve checked the processes when this happens and nothing is obvious. Doesn’t seem to matter whether I have apps open or closed, same thing. No screen saver, just blank screen.
It’s a 5 y/o HP Pavillion A820N Media Center PC running 11.2 2.6.31.12-20-desktop (recently installed). I aired it out a week or so ago when I installed the new drive, eliminating dust as the problem. Didn’t happen with XP. Thanks
Maybe the fan is suffering from too much dust and occasionally gets thwarted.
4436time wrote:
> Didn’t happen with XP.
- you may need to adjust your system to allow the CPU to
automatically scale back when the system is ‘idle’…i think XP does
that by default, and i hear is pretty well tuned (you know MS works
closely with HP to make sure the software fits the hardware…and, HP
also works closely with Novell to ensure the same with the commercial
SLES/D products…but, for us, not so much…)
have you yet tried adjusting your Kpowersave for max quiet? (i assume
you are using KDE, you didn’t say, though i asked…)
- additionally, since XP is primarily a single user system a “not in
use” XP is pretty much “not in use”…
whereas Linux is born from a strong multi-user past and there are lots
of different things going on which you may not be aware of, but all of
which will require CPU cycles, and hard disk attention etc…all of
these generate heat…
- i see you check processes and see nothing…good for you…but,
consider the possibility that when you hear the fan spin up it could
be reacting to a slow heat build up which came from several different
small things which ran over the last 15 minutes while the fan was not
turning…and all those processes had ended by the time the fan started…
to constantly track processes in use and report such to log have a
look at atop…
- you say you recently aired out the box, and added a new drive which
brings up several questions:
a. maybe the new drive generates more heat than the old–everything
in the case adds to the heat load which must be dealt with. not much
you can do about that…
b. how old is this machine and/or is it possible you accidentally
nudged the CPU heat sink enough to disturb the very thin layer of
thermal grease between the heat sink and the CPU…if you did, then
the CPU could be ‘feeling’ that loss of cooling and commanding the fan
to RUN now… i ask about the age because a three or so year old
application of thermal grease is more brittle than two months old, and
looses efficiency in heat transfer AND is more easily disturbed when
cleaning out the chicken bones…
c. in addition to the new disk (did you ADD the disk, or replace the
disk) have you added anything else (ram, sound card, optical disk
readers, whatever) into your system box? i ask because most box makers
are in the business of making a profit! (surprised?) and they
carefully calculate exactly the electrical power requirements of the
box they SELL you…and they insert into that system the least
expensive power supply unit which will provide enough power to the
as sold unit… then, if you add stuff that needs more power it
causes the powersupply unit to work harder than it should, and it does
that ever inefficiently and ever hotter…
- you said it never did this in XP. so? have you run XP since you
added the drive and swept out the feathers? did it ever do it in Red
Hat, Debian or any other industrial strength multi-user system?
–
palladium
Thanks for the info, you’ve given me a couple things to check.