System "always running" after recent updates? [Solved]

[greendave8]

Hi All,
My system has developed the habit of always churning away doing something... Even when I think it should be idling. The temperature can sore up to 80 Celsius and I cant work out why, or what tasks it is undertaking...It does vary during the day, but I can report that up until about two weeks ago, the system idled all day at 31Celsius.
If I run TOP here is what it says, but I dont understand most of it.... Well I would paste TOP output if it would let me, but it wont. It changes too quickly.....
Any ideas what is making my system run hotter and noisier than usual?
Sorry for the vagueness of this. Nothing in TOP output is making me think "thats the culprit"

gd8

[Fitzcarraldo]

Try using HTOP instead of TOP. HTOP is much better. Press F6 and you can chose the default sort column, so you can show all the CPU-intensive or memory-intensive tasks at the top of the list, for example.

[manifesto]

Is that a laptop ?
I had same problem and I get it sorted out by cleaning out inside the laptop.
Taking out covers I could and blow air inside.
Everything came back to normal (I guess around 50C to 60C).

[greendave8]

Hi All,
I have vacuumed the case, cleaned the fans and given everything a mechanical "once over".

I have also downloaded HTOP and am using that to see what processes are running.I am still unable to copy the output of htop, as konsole crashes.... I can see the CPU is being used mostly around 4% on ....a root process usr/bin/X -br -novtsitch -quiet 0 vt7 nolisten tcp -auth /var/run

This is probably nothing for me to worry about, but I just cant help but wonder why in the last 2-3 weeks, my machine is idling about 10degrees c more than it dud previous. Used to idle at 31, now its more like 41degrees C....
Ambient temperature in the room, has not changed....

gd8

[manifesto]

did you do some kernel upgrade ?
Anyway if konsole crash it is a bit weird.
did you try to trace htop ?

[greendave8]

Hi, yes it maybe the kernel upgrade.... I am running latest kernel and upgraded it using the wiki instructions (as I have done many times before)I am running kernel 3.3.0
How do I trace HTOP?
thanx for the interest...
gd8

[greendave8]

Updated the kernel to 3.3, seems better. I have marked topic Solved.

cheers

gd8