Hello Penguins,
I’m looking for distro advice. For the last 4-5years I have rocked this laptop, MSI PS63 Modern RC. I have tried Debian, Garuda, Ubuntu, and now currently rocking Tumbleweed. Although I am statisfied with the current choice of distro, my laptop still overheats like crazy whenever its preasured even slightly, for example: doing updates, being on zoom for uni, or ofc low-end gaming.
I realise the laptop is old, but i really want it to last half a year longer before i start working for a company, which then will replace my need for having a personal laptop.
So, should I try a more lightweight distro or do you think the problem lies elsewhere? I’ve had the same issue across all other distros i’ve tried. I’ve looked at trying Alpine and MicroOS from openSUSE.
Appriciate any pointers!
How do you mean that its overheating? My GF says the same about her laptop, but its just cooling itself off. Does yours freeze or start slowing down a lot? Are you monitoring temps and see that they’re beyond your CPU acceptable range (usually 90C, IIRC)?
Yeah, the system totally slows down quite a bit, everything from the browser to my IDE uses quite a bit of time to load.
If you are seeing temps out of spec for your CPU, its not unheard of for thermal paste to dry or even shift if the laptop has been through some chassis strain. Could be worth a careful examination.
Can you hear your laptop’s fan speed up when it’s overheating? Linux on my old laptop couldn’t control the fan speed so it was always overheating. When I figured out how to manually set it to maximum, it overheated much less.
This could also be done to the RAM filling up and/or high I/O activity of the disk. I suggest to investigate these possibilies as well