I set up Linux Mint Cinnamon on a laptop my friend gave me with a broken Windows Install. She gave it back to me and told me it was very slow, YouTube videos were stuttering etc.
Now I have it here for testing and for the first 30 minutes everything went fine. Stress test with s-tui
and four 4K YouTube Videos in parallel. Unplugged the power, CPU went down a bit but still everything good.
Then from one moment to the other - everything slowed down, while only watching one YouTube video. I checked s-tui
and CPU frequencies are down to ~200MHz while load is pretty heavy. Every click has a lag of multiple seconds, I couldn’t even open Shutter to make a screenshot as it is not responding.
Anybody any idea what’s going on here? Is Cinnamon too much for this device? I am not much of a hardware guy and also don’t understand a lot about operating systems, so please be a bit patient with me ;)
Laptop is Lenovo Yoga X1 3rd Gen i7-8550U CPU @ 1.80GHz x 4 16 GB RAM
85C could be throttling
What to do about it?
As others have said, open it up and check the fans.
I’d boot it with it open, my guess is a fan is slow to start because the bearings are worn, and you can see this when booting with the case open.
I’ve replaced a few on Lenovos over the years, cheap on ebay.