At 02:46 PM 11/9/2002 -0500, Gary Thorpe wrote:
>Does the laptop have a fan and does it turn on after heavy usage? The
>only way to prevent a power-off is to cool the system down either by
>throttling it back and/or turning on a fan. Usually the first will
>happen automatically before it shuts down

(This isn't directly related to the original question, but...) Some models 
of Thinkpads with a particular version of system BIOS fail to turn on their 
fans when the system heats up IFF they are booted while running on 
batteries (if they're booted while plugged into the wall, they work fine). 
I learned this from a bulletin on IBM's website after noticing that my 
Thinkpad 600X became extremely hot at seemingly random times (with the fan 
remaining silent) while at other times the fan ran and it was cool. Since 
flashing a new BIOS, I haven't had this problem anymore.

As far as I've been able to find, Thinkpads don't have any user-accessible 
fan setting, at least nothing that can be tweaked from their Windows 
Control Panel App, so I don't imagine there's anything that could be done 
from NetBSD either. Don't know about other brands of hardware (I think 
Toshiba Porteges have a setting, but don't know whether or not it uses a 
standard interface).