[t420] Sudden onset heat / fan noise?

[kipper91]

Hello,

My thinkpad T420, about a year and a half old, was fine and dandy just a week ago. But in the last week the fan has been constantly running at audible (ie, pretty high powered) levels. Not sure how this happened, no major event or program install that I can think of. The first thing I noticed was just much greater and more constant than normal fan noise.

I booted up a hardware monitoring program and sure enough my cpu temps are idling around 53C. Currently, with just chrome open:
HDD: 36 C
GPU: 43
CPU General: 49
CPU Cores: 52 and 54

Maybe you could help me out by sharing your idle temps for a T420 of similar spec?:
Win 7 64bit
Intel Core i5-2520 2.5Ghz
8.0gb ram
Nvidia NVS 4200M GPU (but idling just uses intel graphics)

Idle CPU use hovers around 2%, so that seems normal. The only thing that I can think of was that I started up a fairly graphically demanding game, Alan Wake, a week ago that may have tweaked something internally? But I don't play games often, and I've played Alan Wake problem-free in the past on this machine

[RealBlackStuff]

Check this post on the Lenovo Forum about T420 noise.
It has by now 119 (one hundred and nineteen) pages.
Join the club...
http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-a ... d-p/443569

Tip: switch off the Dolby Home Theater.

[kipper91]

Thanks a bunch for the link, i'll look into all the thread has to offer.

This is such a bummer though, to go from a normally functioning machine to now: where the fan are roaring to keep things under 55c.. while just browsing the internet

[house kitten]

Check this post on the Lenovo Forum about T420 noise.
It has by now 119 (one hundred and nineteen) pages.
Join the club...
http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-a ... d-p/443569

Tip: switch off the Dolby Home Theater.

I do not find Dolby Home Theater on my t420.