Linux Mint/Ubuntu Overheating Laptop

Back when I tried Ubuntu, and later on when I tried Linux Mint, one of the biggest problems I noticed was their tendencies to heat up quite a bit and the fans run at maximum, even when running idle on my HP dv6568se laptop. It runs an Intel Core 2 Duo at 1.6 GHz.

After realizing that other people have had the same problem, I spent an afternoon Googling around for CPU frequency throttling and the different utilities that you can use. It took me a while until I found the right one. I have now throttled my CPU down to 1.0 GHz and the heat level isn't so bad anymore. Here's how I made mine work.

Modules you may or may not need in your /etc/modules file:

powernowd
cpufreq_ondemand
cpufreq_powersave
cpufreq_performance
cpufreq_conservative
cpufreq-userspace
battery
ac
processor
thermal
acpi-cpufreq

Then I installed kpowersave and cpufreq-utils from the package manager. I set kpowersave to run on startup by going to Control center, Sessions, and added it as a startup program.

Use cpufreq-info in a Terminal to see what frequency steps your processor is capable of, then use cpufreq-set -d [value in KHz] to set a minimum supported frequency and cpufreq-set -u [value in KHz] to set a maximum supported frequency. So the commands I used were:

cpufreq-info
cpufreq-set -d 1000000
cpufreq-set -u 1000000

Now my kpowersave utility reports the processor running at 1000 MHz and the heat problem has noticably improved.