Fan noise and battery consumption on HP envy 15. Opensuse 11.3

English Hardware
1

HI,
The fan noise caused by my HP envy 15 when I’m using OpenSuse 11.3 is driving me nuts.

When the computer is under W7 there is almost no fan noise. In OpenSuse, however, every three or two minutes the fan goes very loud. It sounds as if the machine were doing hard processing work when it is just surfing and doing office stuff.
Another issue is the battery consumption, I already tried the power option but the under OpenSuse the machine eats the battery in almost half of the time than under W7. it stands for just one hour under OpenSuse, when it uses two in W7.

Somebody has experienced the same or knows what happens and how to fix it?

Thanks for any advice and help

These machine comes with a core i7 and an ATI graphic card.

2

So I have no idea just what the power is doing, but I found a very interesting article on this laptop at:

Andreas Demmer » Review: Running Linux on the HP Envy 14

I would check it out. Also, I have a script that can be used to load a newer kernel as the article suggests if you are interested that would be easier to use.

Thank You,

3

I checked the website. His solution is based on updating the Kernel and some other stuff I really did not understand.

However, I got the impression that before I have to check all the software and the hardware to be sure there is not going to be a problem to update the kernel.

I’m right? or it is completely safe to do it?

4

Well, there is no way that someone could say that attempting to update your kernel can not go wrong. The script I have written is designed to do no harm by preserving your original setup. One thing is for sure and that is you will want to backup all important data before you proceed and if your lively hood depends on this PC to continue working, I would not do any more to it. If this PC is not for production work as they call it and you have backed up any important data files, then I would proceed with the next step and read my instructions on how to update your kernel file. Ask any questions that you like before you proceed.

S.A.K.C - SuSE Automated Kernel Compiler

Thank You,

5

It’s your ATI graphics card which is causing the problem. OpenSUSE 11.3
by default does not come with power management for ATI Radeon cards. To install
it you have two options:

  1. If you’d like to keep using the radeon open source driver that comes with
    openSUSE 11.3, you need to upgrade your kernel to version 2.6.35 or newer.
    These latter kernels have open source power management support for Radeons.
    It’s still experimental, though.

  2. You can install ATI’s Catalyst driver (fglrx) instead of radeon. For openSUSE
    11.3 you need Catalyst 10.7 or newer. This one provides quite decent power
    management. Watch out for the posts on “the black squares problem” in this
    forum, though, when using Catalyst.