Spurious thermal shutdowns on Dell Studio 1557

[Bartosz Fabianowski]

> I use $20.00 USD aluminum cooling pad with the pair of built-in
> USB-powered fans when doing buildworld and/or compiling something
> comparably heavy.

I have no problem with using such a contraption. What still has me 
confused though is that I built world and 700 ports before hitting the 
first thermal-related shutdown. How come the problem only appeared after 
a couple of months? Dust buildup - that quickly?

> It is really hard to second guess what Windows does if _PSV>  _CRT.

True, it might be doing some magic. The only Windows installation I have 
is inside VirtualBox - so I cannot investigate what it would do under 
these circumstances.

Right now, I am running with _PSV and _CRT swapped, as per Ian Smith's 
suggestion (_PSV=85.0C and _CRT=95.0C). While building KDE, the machine 
just hit 85°C. Passive cooling successfully prevented the temperature 
from increasing beyond 87°C - but at huge cost: it reduced the CPU speed 
to 119 MHz.

I have upgraded the two stacks of post-it notes at the back of the 
machine to packs of handkerchiefs. This increases the space between desk 
and laptop from 1cm to 3cm and seems to reduce temperatures a bit. 
Dell's stock laptop feet are only 5mm tall... so having to do this is 
odd yet again.

- Bartosz