Aspire 5315-2153 Question

Hi all,

I have owned this Aspire 5315-2153 for nearly a year now (bought it real cheap) and love it. It came with a 1.73ghz Celeron M, 1gb RAM and Vista. I upgraded the RAM to 2GB but have left the processor alone as it suits my needs.

It suffered from a problem where the fan would not kick in after standby in any OS. I've run Vista, XP, and Linux on this thing and all suffered the same problem. I was lead to believe this was because I uninstalled the Acer bloatware that shipped with the laptop (why they would have bloatware control the fan is beyond me)

I remedied this by using a program called i8kfanGUI on both Vista and XP. It worked fine. Recently I upgraded the BIOS to 1.34 which others claimed fixed the fan problem. It seemed to do just that.

Currently I am dual booting XP and Vista and all is well. However when I have used linux on the 5315 the keyboard seems to be hotter and things just don't seem right. I did not monitor the temps but I'm fairly sure something is not right.

To sum this up here is my question:

Is it possible that the fan is not acting right under linux?What controls the fan? Is there a BIOS update to solve this? The bios version is 1.34 as of now.

Thanks.

 

bump. All I want to know is what controls the fan on the 5315 and am I hurting it by using Linux (namely Ubuntu or OpenSUSE)

 

I think that you are a bloatware user .

Set windows XP, and the ACER software .. ALL OF IT .

And start using the laptop for productive ways , instead of using it as guinea pig.

 

What are you talking about. I UNINSTALLED the bloatware originally and I'm certainly not installing it again. I will use my laptop for whatever "ways" I choose.

All I want to know is what controls the fan on this laptop.

 

As I understand it:

1) The cpu has power saving and status reporting features - the most recent cpus have the most features (eg variable fsb, voltage, clock speed)

2)The cpu can be asked about its current state by things like the BIOS or OS (eg current temperature/s, clock speed, voltage)

3) The OS has services which read the cpu's state and the activity of the system and take appropriate action, eg if the system is idle the cpu can be told to slow down, use one core etc.

4) The OS services can also use the cpu state to take other action, eg if the cpu temp is rising and the fan is running slowly, the fan can be speeded up.

Which services do what I don't know as I'm not an expert on the internals of Windows .

It is worth noting that Windows services can sometimes fail to control things in the right way (eg if the OS was installed when an old generation cpu was in place the service/s may not look for or use features that are are present in a later generation cpu).

This can be remedied by reinstalling Windows from scratch so that it recognises the new cpu features or installing a utility like IK8Fan - its effectively a supplementary (backstop) service making sure the cpu/fan speed gets managed properly.

All of the above depends on the BIOS accurately passing information about the cpu's capabilities, hence the improvement you saw after upgrading the BIOS. I don't see any reason why you shouldn't upgrade to the 1.43 version of the 5315 BIOS, lots of people are using it successfully. Be careful doing the upgrade of course.

I can't offer any suggestions on linux as I've not used it all all but the principles will be the same. No doubt an expert will be along shortly, or after the holiday season is over .