Darren New wrote:
> Invisible wrote:
>> - On every laptop known to man, holding down the power button will 
>> forcibly power down the laptop. This does not work while the laptop is 
>> frozen. (Fortunately the battery typically dies after ~5 minutes or so.)
> 
> Wow. I was under the impression this was built right into the power 
> supplies. Maybe not on a laptop, tho.

Indeed.

On the other hand, I was *also* under the impression that the cooling 
fan is hardware-controlled. But it turns out to be software-controled. (!!)

I discovered this while trying to install SUSE on my dad's ancient brick 
of a laptop. The install kept failing in bizare and unexplained ways. 
Until I picked up the laptop and almost burnt my hand off!

We rebooted the laptop, and as soon as the BIOS screen showed up, the 
fans started spinning like mad. We waited for them to slow down. (It 
took a while.) Then we resumed the installation attempt. Same problem. 
No matter how hot the laptop got, no fans.

The solution in the end was quite simple. Reboot with the laptop hot. 
The fans spin up to full power. Rather than waiting for them to stop, 
just start installing. The fans remained at full speed until the system 
soft-reset onto the new kernel. After that they appeared to work "normally".

GO. FIGURE.

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