KFanI8K

Thanks for the explanation. I think I will give this a try. I used to have a gentoo installation.....I hadn't bothered setting it up to suspend when I closed the lid.....one day I closed the lid without shutting down, put the laptop in the bag and left it in the car on a pretty hot day...stupid huh?...well my hard drive kept failing after that until it wouldn't boot at all. So I am a little sensitve about temperature now. I haven't ever played with any temperature related stuff in the BIOS and I would have expected the machine to shut down if temperature became critical but hey I've got a new hard drive and a lot of compilation in front of me.
As I said I'm going to give this thing a try now......not that I'm expecting it to necessarily help with the kind of behaviour that led to the demise of my drive.....but I am hoping to find that your code can read the cpu temp and kick off a shutdown if it reaches a preset (or be modified to do that).
I've read about other peoples i8k drives failing and am wondering if some of these may be temperature related so I would like to keep temp down in order to hopefully prolong drive life......I'm expecting it too fail one day now though!
Thanks again.