Advise on upgrade and overheating issues

[Pirx]

Hello, all. I'm glad I joined this great community, so I'll jump right to the questions (finally got the time to make this long post)

Currently my T60p 2007-9EU (2GB RAM, Hitachi 100GB 7200 SATA + , WinXP SP2) has T2700 Core Duo CPU and two hard drives (one in UltraSlim bay). Before I installed Notebook Hardware Control the system often powered down on itself because of overheating - the regular temp was in higher 70s - lower 80s and that's with only Outlook/Miranda/Firefox running. Whenever I fired up something more resource hungry (Photoshop, Visual Studio) or launched some disk-spinning activity (like backup) the temperature becomes prohibitive and my laptop just shuts down. Now I am running on (mostly) reduced frequency (NHC shows 1GHz) which kind of defeats the whole purpose of having a T60 instead of T23 or T42 I had before

In addition to this - I was hoping to upgrade the CPU to Core2Duo T7400 or even T7600 in a couple of months or so. Here's the tricky questions: should I send the laptop for repairs (warranty is still good) now risking that repairs won't be effective once I swap the CPU, or just make the change hoping that the cause of overheating is loose heatsink (as it was the case often pointed out here on forums). This way while upgrading the CPU I may as well fix the heatsink myself.

What does the collective knowledge suggest? I'm pretty set for an upgrade (since I am usually running several large tasks at the same time and can use a faster machine) but the investment will not be justified if I will have to downplay the CPU again.

Any input will be highly appreciated

Update: motherboard info as per CPU-Z

Chipset: i945PM, Rev. 03
BIOS: 79ETC1WW (2.01)

[Pirx]

Alright, seems like I figured the source of my troubles with overheating. A long time ago I must have played with GPU overclocking and, apparently, forgot to put the settings back to normal. Now my GPU always runs overclocked no matter what I do (reinstalled drivers, used ATITool - nothing works). Obviously, I don't have a slightest idea what I used to overclock it and have no idea how to put things back to normal.

The T60p I have sports ATI Mobility FireGL V5200 and there is nowhere in Catalyst center any GPU/memory clock speed settings to be found.

Any ideas?

[Pirx]

Update.

Sent the machine for repairs, the turnaround was amazing (they picked up my laptop on Monday, delivered it back on Wednesday).

The only problem was - when I powered up the laptop there was the error message saying "Fan failure". It wasn't there when I was packing the laptop, that's for sure. Again, why exactly did I send it to depot?

Called EZcare again. They promised to send in the fan so I could replace it myself. While at it (I thought), I might as well change the CPU, so I ordered it as well. Besides, I'm fighting the urge to take laptop apart before that, because I have a feeling someone just forgot to connect the fan back to power...

[WPWoodJr]

Keep us posted!

[dexta]

What RPMs is your fan reaching at the highest level?

[WPWoodJr]

My fan never gets above 3500-3600 RPM when using BIOS control, which is odd because the capability is there to go to 4500. What about yours?

[Pirx]

What RPMs is your fan reaching at the highest level?

It's not reaching anything, since it stopped working.

Got the replacement fan on Friday, but holding off for T7600 I ordered from NewEgg. I also got some thermal paste (I think it's Arctic Silver 5), since I didn't like the thermal stuff on the replacement fan - looked low quality to me, although I could be wrong