[MPlayer-users] konsole freezes

[Adam Nielsen]

> I certainly do have hardware issues. Even though I'm not overclocking at 
> all it just overheats and cuts out when I do any encoding (under doze or 
> linux), unless I have my fan cranking hardcore (I finally ripped the fan 
> off yesterday and squirted some more cooling gel on the cpu, but to no 
> avail... it gets up to about 80C before cutting out!!!).

Woah, that is bad!  Make sure you don't put too much cooling gel between the 
CPU and the heatsink though, otherwise you'll make the temperatures higher.  
The best contact between the heatsink and fan is metal to metal, but there 
are always tiny pockets of air between them which don't conduct heat as well.  
So the idea is to fill those air pockets with thermal paste or something, but 
*not* so much that you remove the metal/metal contact.  There's an 
interesting page that explains it very well, along with a comparison of the 
different types of thermal pastes (including some more bizarre items such as 
toothpaste) here:

http://www.dansdata.com/goop.htm

> Usually this lets me get an encode in, unfortunately konsole (by far my
> preferred terminal), and kde in general, seems to be crashing rather a lot
> these days, even with all the bug fixes! Argh! And I just decided that I 
> really did prefer kde to gnome!

You might find that the excessive temperatures have actually caused damage to 
your CPU, which is exhibited as more and more frequent crashes.  Either way, 
it doesn't seem to be a problem with mplayer, mencoder or konsole - it's just 
one of those unpredictable symptoms of flaky hardware.

Cheers,
Adam.