Diagnosing sudden random freezing

[james2008]

My T60 froze yesterday, twice. I had to restart by powering down manually. I don't think I've had to do this before, certainly never twice in one day.

Memtest 86+ returned no errors after 1 pass. The BIOS-accessible hard drive test also returned no errors.

Maybe it's a heat issue. The bottom of the computer near the VGA port felt hot after the second freeze. But it was under normal load when it froze. Is it safe to run Thinkpad Fan Controller to check temperatures? It's designed for T4X's, and the readme has some dire warnings.

I can't reproduce the freezes. Ha, I was about to buy some RAM for this thing, but maybe I need to think about getting a new computer?

[Colonel O'Neill]

TPFC works on pretty much every ThinkPad after the T4x.

[james2008]

Thanks - are these temps are on the high side?

CPU 69°C (0x78)
APS 47°C (0x79)
PCM 44°C (0x7a)
GPU 80°C (0x7b)
BAT 50°C (0x7c)
BAT 37°C (0x7e)
BUS 47°C (0xc0)
PCI 58°C (0xc1)
PWR 60°C (0xc2)

And after two minutes of running a game:

CPU 83°C (0x78)
APS 48°C (0x79)
PCM 43°C (0x7a)
GPU 98°C (0x7b)
BAT 50°C (0x7c)
BAT 37°C (0x7e)
BUS 48°C (0xc0)
PCI 59°C (0xc1)
PWR 62°C (0xc2)

Edit: Judging by this thread, a simple cleaning might do the trick. Is that just a matter of removing the keyboard and spraying some compressed air at the right side, near the VGA port? Edit: Looks like it - see this thread.

[james2008]

I used compressed air to remove dust from the fan. The GPU temperature fell from ~72-76C to ~62-64C during normal use. The CPU temperature also dropped, by around 5-8 degrees (now hovers at around 55C). I uploaded before and after pictures here: http://imgur.com/a/mDSAN. Warning: the two files are large - nearly a MB apiece.

The computer hasn't locked up since I cleaned the fan. Should I assume the problem was temperature related? The computer did not shut down. Instead, it froze, and I had to power down manually, which does not seem to be what happens during temperature-related crashes.

[Harryc]

Well, if you cleaned the fan and the freezes haven't occurred since, it's a good bet that's it. Give it a couple of more weeks to be sure. Heat can do odd things...it's not always hot enough to shut down the machine, but may effect some other component. 98*C for example is WAY off the scale for acceptable GPU heat. Perhaps the GPU was revolting.

[richk]

It sounds like heat to me. I also suggest replacing the thermal paste. The stuff does dry out.