Laptop Overheating issue in Kubuntu

My Laptop is 10 years old it has intel i3 4gb ram samsung rv509 .
When ram usage is around 1.5gb it start heating and becomes very hot I can’t type easily .
I am using kubuntu , I used a program called tlp but it has no effect

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You should properly clean your laptop and then hope it gets better.
By “properly clean” I don’t mean taking a wet cloth and putting it on the laptop for a second. I mean, take the laptop apart, de-dust all fans inside the laptop and re-paste the CPU heatpaste, etc.

If it still get’s just as hot or so hot you cannot type on it easily, you should immediately stop using that laptop. If you cannot or do not want to remove the battery from it, it may become very dangerous, if exposed to excessive heat.

If you feel the heat already on the keys of the keyboard, then it already must be extremely hot inside. It usually takes extremely high temperatures inside for them to be felt, even on the keyboard.

However, even if you remove the battery, eventually one of the components will degrade extremely fast, until the point of defection. So, while removing the battery removes the potential of burning your hands severely, you still will destroy the laptop’s components in the long run, if it keeps getting as hot as you describe.
So, if you are not able to reduce the heat significantly, I would advise you to stop using that laptop and perhaps sell parts of it or you could give it to someone who always uses it only for the absolutely lightest task, that do not generate excessive heat as much.

Either way, considering the age of the laptop, I would already generally recommend you to get a new one. It just does not make sense to use an old one like that, if you are using it regularly and really depend on it.

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I’m using Kubuntu on my 2013 Chromebook. It does warm up when watching video, but never when typing or simple browsing.

Clean the fans inside, then you might have to remove the CPU and put fresh heat sink compound on it. Since it’s 10 years old, it’s a good one to practice on, and if you break it it’s time to get a fresh one.

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Ditto on the cleaning fans and regreasing the heat sink, though it sounds like the cpu heatsink is working with the case getting so hot.
One thing you can try to help diagnose the heating problem is to run htop in a terminal and watch to see if you have an app going into “race” mode and hogging a cpu at 100% which heats things up terribly. Discord is great at doing just that in ubuntu systems. Installing and running sensors could help measure the heating as well. I always have conky on my desktop and set it to change colors when things get hot but it’s a lifestyle choice as it can be difficult to get set up.

Another thing you might do is switch to a lighter desktop environment as Kde is one of the heaviest out there. Xubuntu replaces kde with xfce for a lighter load, but it’s got it’s quirks.
I just set up Artix with runit and Cinnamon desktop on a couple machines and really like it. My ryzen 5 machine’s fans pretty much shut down when I switched from peppermint10(frankenbuntu).
Some of the older stuff just flat out ran hot when loaded and the best you can do is make sure the fan can and do go full hair dryer and actually vents properly.
I’ve seen many slim notebooks that don’t vent well when sitting flat on a table, and a few that went volcano when kids used them on a bed. I keep a spacer under my current work notebook, an Acer apsire 5(ryzen3) and even aim a fan at it to help airflow when I’m doing heavy stuff like stacking astrophotos etc.
Hope all this rambling helps. :smiley:

This is good advice

This is conventional wisdom which is plainly wrong.

KDE was pretty heavy compared with some desktop environments of the time, perhaps 10 years ago.
Now, memory consumption is hardly higher than XCFE’s and the CPU load, KDE itself creates, is negligible.

The overheating is certainly not created by KDE.

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It’s sad to see how something you did decades ago haunts you still to this very day. I feel bad for KDE that people still think we are running KDE 2.0 or something like that instead of the lightning fast KDE 5 Plasma or higher.

KDE is very lightweight. Perhaps it can’t compete with the extreme lightweights, like LXQt, but it can compete with pretty much every other common desktop environment in terms of performance.

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The purpose of my comment was to volunteer my time to aid in troubleshooting a heating problem, not to enter a debate about de or wm which is why I didn’t recommend another one. I only mentioned it because I’ve seen plenty of full de’s have trouble on older computers with less resources

@Mohit_Bora It’s also possible that it’s a graphics driver problem. Running in text mode and monitoring the system could show that. What version of Kubuntu are you running?

You just need to upgrade your hardware. 10 years ago, technologies were different, your computer is morally and technically outdated.

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