On my previous laptop I suffered with repeated over-heating problems whenever CPU load went high for a prolonged period. After several emergency shutdowns (performed by ACPI) I discovered the problem:

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor

returned the result: “performance”

Inserting the following line before the ‘exit’ line in /etc/rc.local:

echo "conservative" > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor

resolved the problem.

For all available scaling governors:

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_governors

A problem I found when using the Linux client for Skype is that it will try to perform file locking, which is a problem if your home partition is an NFS drive.

To overcome this limitation, create a directory on the local hard disk:

1. sudo mkdir /usr/local/skype
2. sudo chown tom.tom /usr/local/skype

Delete the configuration that Skype attempted to install, and symlink to the directory on the local harddisk:

1. rm -rf /home/tom/.Skype
2. ln -s /usr/local/skype /home/tom/.Skype

After this Skype worked as normal.