Laptop overheating after doing the usual cleaning routine

Solution 1:

It's been 3 months and finally pin-pointed the problem. It's a hardware problem and that spammy-looking ad-filled Indian site was right (won't post it here as it's a commercial entity), it's chip-level damage that's common to a number of Vaio laptops.

So the best and probably the only solution is to turn it over to your nearest service center for repairs. If it's under warranty, you're fine. If not, well, expect shelling out a few bucks for it. You might be better off buying a new notebook.

Anyways, I got another workaround and it's highly dangerous. I am only sharing this for purposes of informing that there is a way to get around it, but has its tradeoffs. This is not sound advice, just stating that it's possible.

This dangerous move involves disabling the ACPI critical trip point of the Linux. To do this, one must edit their grub file:

gksudo leafpad /etc/default/grub

And add thermal.nocrt=-1 to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT as shown:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash thermal.nocrt=1"

Then update grub:

sudo update-grub

Then reboot.

This disables the ACPI critical trip point but not the thermal sensor, so that we can still monitor if afterwards.

After doing so, I ran my logger script. However, to compensate for the lack of a natural trip point handler, I set GKrellM to fire an action when the event happens. Since GKrellM is usually delayed, it's good for knowing that when it goes over the trip point, it has gone over it for a significant amount of time when I fire an action.

Then I went on with my usual routine. After doing so, the system tripped it again. However, it was a sudden spike, that it did not even register in GKrellM but my logger got it recorded. It's a very abrupt spike and that was it.