[ale] laptop overheats before install completes

[briarpatch.jim at gmail.com (Jim Philips)]

Just trolling for possible solutions: My laptop has an ATI Radeon
video card. Unless the Catalyst driver is installed, it quickly starts
to overheat. I messed up my Ubuntu install, so now I want to
reinstall. But when I try, about 50% of the files get copied to disk
and then it slows down and finally shuts off due to overheating. This
wasn't a problem earlier, but I think with each thermal shutdown, the
laptop gets a little more susceptible to overheating. Once Catalyst is
installed, everything works fine. But I can only install Catalyst if I
complete the install of Ubuntu. Any workarounds anybody can think of?