I have bought BenQ S52-M36 for a year and 10 months. It worked very great with MS Windows XP Home Edition and I have switched to Ubuntu last year since Dapper Drake. This is a long history which I have to wait for sound driver to work properly on Linux for a year and eventually solved during last 2 months by ALSA. The last version of Ubuntu in this laptop is Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04 beta updated in this morning including kernel 2.6.20-13. That was the last boot! Later booting always hanged. Trying to boot in recovery mode gave me a hint.

Critical Temperature Reached (100 C), shutting down

Terrible! Making a cup of coffee needs only 94 C but wait! This is my laptop, not boiler. The truth is the fan seemed to stop working. As a result, the CPU temperature goes too high. Note that I can boot successfully if running on battery using the minimum CPU speed. Below was what I saw.

sugree@sugree-laptop:~$ cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THM0/temperature 
temperature:             100 C
sugree@sugree-laptop:~$ cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THM0/trip_points 
critical (S5):           99 C
passive:                 95 C: tc1=5 tc2=4 tsp=600 devices=0xc1d39338

When I saw above temperature, I immediately shutdown the laptop and find a new one. Unfortunately, I will go to Phuket tomorrow for presenting in ANSCSE11 and I have not done any page of presentation yet. However, it is my fortunate that this event does not happen tomorrow morning. As long as I am at office, I should have at least workaround solution.

My solution is to use IBM T43 in stock at office. I don't want to touch the data and MS Windows XP Professional in this laptop and I would like to continue using Ubuntu on this laptop. So I just switched my harddisk to the existing one. It works so great! This post is written in IBM T43. One thing I have to do is to reconfigure X to use ATI instead of i810.

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

Everything are automatically detected and works out of box. Now I only concern about the screen resolution. I lived with BenQ at 1280x768 for so long but now T43 offers me 1440x1050. It is definitely better! I am afraid to back to smaller resolution again. Below is what I got in IBM T43.

sugree@sugree-laptop:~$ cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THM0/temperature 
temperature:             46 C
sugree@sugree-laptop:~$ cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THM0/trip_points 
critical (S5):           99 C
passive:                 95 C: tc1=5 tc2=4 tsp=600 devices=0xc1d39338

Tags: laptop, benq, ibm, ubuntu, acpi