Hmm. My fans are running. Constantly. And I keep shutting down in the middle of a game or even while a screensaver is running.

And after hearing about bapoumba’s trouble with an overheating laptop, I’m starting to wonder if perhaps my issues are related. As a troubleshooting measure I’ve dropped out of a graphical environment completely (I’m posting this from w3m), and still the fans are running full bore. htop says my system load is normal — or at least somewhat normal, but with the CPU pegged at 100 percent, but no system process peaking at more than 5 percent.

I’m not running much — shredding an external drive on a USB port, running an rtorrent download, w3m and nano, and that’s about it. Still, both fans are running on this Inspiron 8000, and they’re both blowing cool air (not hot, as is usually the case).

Perhaps there’s a power management tweak that showed up in a Feisty update that’s making my fans spin. I think I’ll leave it in this console environment while I’m at work, and see if it continues. My only fear is more wear on the fans on a 7-year-old computer.