windows 7 causes t61 to run hot

[boyAfraid]

hello all...

i have a t61 running xp pro, win7 pro, and ubuntu 9.10. the win7 partition was an in-place upgrade from vista business, though i upgraded from a clean vista image (only thinkvantage suite installed).

i'm concerned that the machine is running extremely hot while i'm running win7. core temp (0.99.5) reports my cores routinely hitting 85-90c while doing nothing but browsing with firefox (3-4 tabs). i've also noticed that the loads don't drop below 85% on one core, and 50% on the other.

by comparison, when running xp on the same machine, the same activity produces 45-50c temps at 2-20% load.

i know i need to tweak win7 to reduce the number of services running, but the load still seems ridiculously high. any advice on likely culprits?

machine: t61 7658-cto
proc: core 2 duo t7300
graphics: integrated (intel 965 express)
ram: 2gb ddr2
bios: 7LETC6WW (2.26-1.08)

thanks in advance!
bA

[makaveli559m]

I know the feeling I am wondering that too right now if there is an issue Im going to send mine back I barely bought my T61 so I could play video games, but it keeps getting to hot that it sometimes slows down.

[diaz1023]

i have had the same issue as well. i noticed this especially when watching videos on hulu.com. once i stop that and just regular browsing it cools down.

[steyoung]

I just installed Windows 7 on my T60. I have firefox 3.6 running with 5 active tabs. Gmail, google news, two other news sites which refresh automatically and the forum tab I'm writing this on.

I'm seeing processor utilization of between 0 and 2% with occasional spikes which I assume is when google is refreshing stuff in the firefox tabs. I have not done any tuning with services etc. I just did a full install of Windows 7. Then I used windows update until it was totally up to date. Finally I installed Think Vantage and System Update 4 and got all the required thinkpad drivers installed. I'm not trying to run any videos yet - I'm just reporting on 'idle' running. I have not checked core temps. How do I do that?

In general I've noticed that Windows 7 is much better with resources and cpu than Vista which was a real hog. I had a T40p before this T60 which I had running Vista for about 6 months. When I upgraded it to Windows 7, there was a noticeable improvement in performance and 'idle' processor utilization.

I'm not sure I know why your experience is different to mine or what you can gain from my report. Is there a difference due to ram size? I have 2.5gb. Task manager is showing 2558mb total, 1199mb cached, 1750mb available and 612mb free.

[goofyGAguy]

I have not checked core temps. How do I do that?

http://www.alcpu.com/CoreTemp

[steyoung]

Thanks goofyGAguy.

My temps are:
- Core0:51c
- Core1: 53c

[boyAfraid]

thanks for the replies.

here's an update: i think i found my root cause. on my win7 partition, i'm running nod32 v4 as my anti-virus. what i discovered is that when nod32 does a "startup scan", it puts a lot of strain on my cpu. that was what was causing the spike in load. now that my machine has been fully scanned, nod32 is a lot less demanding and i'm not seeing load in the 0-10% range and my temps are normal at 40-45c.

overall, i'm very happy with win7. i've noticed that background services don't really load until needed. when i went to tweak my system, i found i needed to do very little. i'm now able to run dexpot (virtual desktops), switcher (expose for windows), growl (notifications), and dropbox (file backup) upon startup and notice very little drain on the system. pretty great. this t61 looks like it'll last me another few years. awesome!

thanks!
bA