overheating problem with Dell Inspiron 1100 laptop

[carrja99]

I have a dell inspiron 1100 laptop that, for whatever reason, gets insanely hot with linux installed on it. I can't quite figure out what could be causing it really. I know it's not the laptop itself as I don't have the same problem with windows, and various distributions seem to cause the same issue.

I'm sure it's probably some special configuration issue that I need to set, but I'm largely stumped at what could possibly be causing it. Any ideas?

[klackenfus]

I'd first check to see what services you have running and shut down anything you don't need.

[cybertron]

I think you want to look into cpufreq. It will throttle down the CPU when it's not in use to keep the heat down. I don't know much more as I use wmlaptop on mine which does the same thing, but isn't especially useful if you don't want to use dockapps (plus it always requires a kernel recompile, at least in Mandrake, so it can use /proc/acpi), but I'm sure someone here can expand upon cpufreq for you.