HP ProBook 4720s - Fans running constantly at full

Question

I'm currently making a function using pygame that draws a message on the screen, adding one character each frame (i.e. The Hunt for Red October). I know that I could simply copy (or pass) gradually bigger slices from the original string, but I know that it would be very resource-intensive. Is there a better way to do this?

Code, using gradually bigger slices:

def full_screen_dialog_tt(thesurface, thefont, theclock, message, thebeep):
 i = 0
 while(i < len(message)): # Initialize the string display
  theclock.tick(60)
  thesurface.fill((0, 0, 0))
  thesurface.blit(thefont.render(message[i]+"_"))
  pygame.display.flip()
  thebeep.play()
 while(1): # Whole string is here now
  theclock.tick(60)
  for event in pygame.events.get():
   if event.type == MOUSEBUTTONDOWN: return

Solution

Have you checked whether you use the proprietary ATI driver (flgrx package)? The open source radeon driver is known to have poor power management support.

Comments

[Andy Partington]

As after James had fixed my hyperlinks issue I can't edit with out destroying the links I will add that I have also updated the BIOS to the newest version as well from the HP Site.

[Admin]

Any news on this issue? Are you happy with the Notebook under Ubuntu? I'm considering to buy one, so I would really appreciate your feedback! Thanks!

[mmirate]

I'm already using pygame.clock for the timing (clock.tick(framespersecond) to be exact).

[mmirate]

Well, I can't just distribute Courier along with the program, and without having a known font to work with, I don't know how many pixels wide or tall it is.

[mmirate]

The frame-rate that I'm passing to pygame.clock.tick is the same 60 that I'm passing to it in the game's main loop. The text isn't "faded" in; it's supposed to look like it's being typed in (either by a keyboard or maybe a slow terminal). As a matter of fact, I may actually have to raise the frame-rate for this segment if I find that it takes forever for long messages to type out - though I'm not sure how many computers could handle it. I guess that if I assumed that there won't be any window manipulation, then I could just blank the surface once.

[Noufal Ibrahim]

The Font object can tell you that pygame.org/docs/ref/font.html#pygame.font.Font. Also, you can distribute a sheet of characters in a custom font along with your game. A Lot of them do that. Read it in as a sprite sheet and render them onto the screen rather than fonts.

[Dirk B.]

For the HP probook 4330s - which is similar - it doesn't.