How to enable safeguards for CPU temperature

You could write a script to display your temperature in dwm's status bar, for example:

temp (){
    awk '{print $4"°C"}' <(acpi -t)
    echo $temp
}
xsetroot -name "$(temp)"

Your sensors output may be more complex, depending on your setup: this works on one of my machines:

 awk '/temp1/ {print +$2"°C"}' <(sensors)

If you patch in statuscolours, you can additionally have the output change colour as the $temp hits higher values...

The Arch Wiki has an introduction to setting up a basic statusbar script and the dwm site includes an .xinitrc example.

You can see my dwm-status script for more details: http://beta.intuxication.org/jasonwryan/archer/file/tip/Scripts/dwm-status

I have exactly the same problem and what I use is the "cpufreqtools" (or just "cpufreq" - can't remember!) package.

It gives you two commands: cpufreq-info and cpufreq-set

cpufreq-info list the current CPU speed and the min and max speeds. and the available steps too.

cpufreq-set is more useful for you because you can limit the maximum speed that your CPU will ever reach.

My overheat-prone CPU has the available speeds of 800MHz, 1.60GHz and 1.80GHz. SO, what I do is limit it to 1.60GHz like this:

cpufreq-set --max 1.60Ghz

Works like a charm!

If you are more advanced in your Linux skills, you could even put it in a bootup script so it's always executed as soon as your Linux starts.

Good luck.