Thinkpads Forum

Every time my T60 is attached to the docking station the temperature goes up so much that the bottom of the laptop is so hot it burns. It seems to go back to normal when I remove it from the docking station.

On Dock = 80 Degrees Celsius / 176 Degrees Fahrenheit
Off Dock = 50 Degrees Celsius / 122 Degrees Fahrenheit

I'm afraid the laptop may overheat and die, as I've seen others end up completely dead from overheating before.

Is this normal? Is the temperature on the dock in the danger zone?

It's not normal.

Check if there happens to be some process running while docked, hogging the CPU (use task manager / process explorer).

I think I may have figured it out, possibly. It seems that its not just when its connected to the dock after all. I found the when I was using Firefox with many tabs open (like 50) it was over working the CPU for many hours straight, pushing the temp way up to almost twice that of normal use. I tend to open tabs and leave them open to come back to them later. It may be related to plug-ins and cpu cycles are being multiplied with each additional tab opened. I've reset Firefox to default and disabled the plug-ins to monitor it for improvement.

So I guess to be on the safe side, if you don't want to potentially fry your mainboard, don't open massive amounts of tabs for long periods of time.