Thinkpads Forum

Here are the temperatures (general working) I reported a few days ago (the 1st column) and what they are now (the 2nd column).

1 cpu 62°C (0x78) --> 46°C
2 aps 43°C (0x79)--> 37°C
3 crd 42°C (0x7a) --> 38°C
4 gpu 81°C (0x7b) --> 69°C
5 bat 38°C (0x7c) --> 33°C
7 bat 34°C (0x7e) --> 30°C
9 bus 48°C (0xc0) --> 41°C
10 pci 55°C (0xc1) --> 47°C
11 pwr 57°C (0xc2)--> 46°C

Initially I don't want to do anything as my T60 doesn't seem to have any problem. But my lap really starts to complain. So I read jeepcoma's mod and want to do something to lower the temperatures.

I took the palmrest and keyboard off. Guess what? my CPU fan is clogged with dust! I become really worrying about my lung, as I though my office is clean enough!

I don't have any special tools, thermal compound and AS5 etc as jeepcoma did. So I just cleaned the CPU fan with a vacuum cleaner and put everything back. The effect is significant as you may notice from above figures. The highest temperature (GPU) drops by 12 degrees!

So if your thinkpad is hot, the first thing you should do is to open it and clean the fan.

My Dell 9300 had a similar issue.

I work at a service shop and dust build up in computers is my second highest cause for people coming in for repair (spyware being the first). Smoking particularly exacerbates the problem and some models are notorious to having severe hardware failures as a result. Older Toshibas used to have the power jack right between the Y of the heatsink and fan which would quickly clog because the fins were to close together. Over time the heat would cause the solder holding the DC jack to the board to come loose. Most people were lucky and only had to replace the jack while others had it short surrounding things.