- Overheating Acer AMD Turion 64x2 TL-58 Notebook problem

My notebook, an Acer Travelmate 5520G, has a bit of a heat problem. Playing Half-Life 2 or Team Fortress 2 for an hour or two forces it to simply shut down. I have been trying to solve that problem for quite a while now.

I downloaded a program called SpeedFan, which helped me monitor the CPU temperature. Well, as it turned out the computer shuts down when it reaches excess temperatures of 95° Celsius (200° Fahrenheit). Admittedly, this is way too much.

The very same program also reads out the current CPU speed, which should be 1.9GHz. At least that is what the manufacturer tried to make me believe by printing it on a sticker on the casing. Surprisingly, SpeedFan showed a CPU speed of more than 2.2GHz right after playing Half-Life 2! I started to investigate into this and found out that Windows Vista obviously automatically changes the CPU speed according to the load it has to deal with. Games need a lot of power, so Vista is trying to grant it more resources: too many in my case.

No worries, though! It is possible to customize Vista´s behavior dealing in this matter. In Control Panel -> Power Options I was able to alter the current power plan. I located the option "Processor Power Management" and set the maximum processor state to 90%. Now, my notebook actually runs on about 1.9GHz and temperatures stay between 50° and 75° Celsius (120° to 170° Fahrenheit). Apparently, Vista was trying to overclock my system.

A lot of people seem to have similar problems and there are a lot of tips and tricks on the web. Anyway, I haven´t found anyone else going down the road I took, yet. So, I thought I´d share my experiences in that matter. Maybe it´ll help someone out there as well.

Update 2010-06-11:
I have switched to Windows 7 now and I have no overheating problems anymore even with processor state at 100%. Yay!