Thinkpads Forum

Hello board, been gone a long time but need to tinker with a T60 of mine and get some help. The T60 model 1951-46U just shuts down randomly, everything is fine and boom, black screen. The CPU gets pretty warm while charging but is fine on battery power, with TP fan control I would run on speed 7 and usually have no probs. I am thinking motherboard, any thoughts out there?

burns

Thermal paste replacement.

Clean the heatsink thoroughly while you're at it..

can be a couple things, either its overheating, or your battery is weak and even when fully charged, it can fail under load and the system will shut off. Get something like hwinfo and monitor your cpu temps, for t60, they can run up to somewhere in 80C when under load, shut off somewhere in 90C. GPU also around there. I had a similar confusing issue where i thought i had overheating issues, but turned out it was the cheap extended battery i bought on ebay was failing even though it was farily recent I bought it. I tore it apart and turns out it was really warn out previously used 18650 cells that were just re-sleeved, some even rusty, all likely previously low quality chinese cells to begin with. It was bought from one of the highest rated listings for "new" extended batteries for thinkpads. I tried a genuine lenovo battery that uses panasonic (japanese) cells and it worked just fine under load.

Overheating to the point of thermal shutdown is usually hard to miss. 99% is that it is not the cause. I support monitoring the CPU temperature (with TPFanControl you don't need any other tools to do that). Unless it's consistently over 80C, I find it hard to believe that a spike would cause a thermal shutdown. Also, this is an Intel integrated T60 (based on the model number), so there is no separate GPU and no GPU thermal sensor.