Working on upgrading an old 2008 laptop for someone from Vista to (also) run Linux, I ran into the most silly issue. Unlike “normal” laptops, the ACER Aspire 5315 does not control its CPU fan through its BIOS (ACPI) – the fan does run on startup, but stops as soon as you start an operating system. Vista then controls it again through a driver. So in a nutshell, unless you have something specifically controlling the fan, it doesn’t run. Obviously this makes the processor heat up considerably within a fairly short space of time (10 minutes or so) and causes the laptop to shut down (thermal protection).

It’s merely a hurdle and not a hindrance for installing Linux – it has a tool to handle this stuff, which needs to be installed and enabled before proceeding with the rest of the installation process.

My main point of this post is just calling out “how stupid” of ACER to design a laptop like this. It really doesn’t help at all. There are standard ways of doing this, and they just ignored it for this particular laptop. Other ACER laptops do things the standard way. Sigh.