Comment 353 for bug 370173

I had almost the same issue with the only difference that it didn't shut down, but every single program was very-very-very slow and nothing helped.

Computer: DELL Studio 1558 laptop (purchased about 6 months ago)

The error I saw at every boot-reboot-shutdown was:
"Critical temperature reached (110C), shutting down."

Laptop behaviour: everything very slow, hdd temp=42-50 C, ACPI temp = 110C (I monitored it in the gnome-panel applet "computertemp")

System: I was running Ubuntu 10.10 and this bug didn't appear immediately after upgrade (clean reinstall from 10.04).
Last week I moved to Debian 6.0 (squeeze) due to my personal preferences and also hoping this bug to dissapear - but it didn't!

Today I've found the fix: BIOS Update! Just performed the update (I had BIOS version A04 - updated to version A10)
Now, everything looks and feels normal and smooth again! (computertemp shows "ACPI temp=27C")

I found 2 ways to do it:
1) under Linux - through libsmbios package (explanations given for Debian, not Ubuntu, though)
http://www.ducea.com/2007/08/27/dell-bios-firmware-updates-on-debian/

2) via Windows 7 Live CD (not Windows XP, cause the DELL Studio 1558 BIOS doesn't support WinXP and you will have a Blue Screen of death with acpi.sys error!)

I used the second way, cause there is no bios update file for linux for this laptop - why? explained here
http://answerpot.com/showthread.php?1534809-Studio%201558%20BIOS%20updates%20not%20available
("Quite a few desktop and notebook systems don't have a method to update BIOS that's supported by firmware-tools. :-( In particular, this model has its Windows-executable BIOS in a package format that firmware-extract doesn't recognize.")

Hope it will help!