I spoke to Acer support who referred me to the small print re: official
acer software blah di blah.
I assume you bought the notebook in the UK. In this case european
consumer law is applicable, and you can conveniently ignore all the
smallprint. If they advertise a 64bit CPU, you can rightfully expect to
run 64bit applications. They may not support the OS, but you are not
asking them to support the OS, so that should be fine.
You can also try to get thermal zones to work. With ACPI that may be
supported on Linux 2.6. In effect, the clock frequency is reduced when
the temperature gets too high, and this prevents overheating.
Personally though, I would not put up with a lemon, and I would get them fix the issue.
I've just
tried the Ubuntu install and whilst exploring how it handles samba
networking it shutdown X with an error along the lines of temp exceeding
44 degrees .... shutting down.
44 degrees is not that much, after all the notebook should probably
work with an environment temperature up to about 35 degrees. So maybe
Ubuntu is being to conservative here? Maybe thermal zones are already
set up, but the shut down temperature is very low?
Unfortunately, I could never get thermal zones to work, so I can't really help you with that :-)
Thomas