X61 Tablet: Thermal Sensing Error?

[X-Man]

I have just bought an X61 Tablet from eBay and am somewhat concerned it is faulty.

It was supplied without a hard disk and battery, and when I powered it on via the mains I was getting an intermittent error ‘Thermal Sensing Error’, maybe 3 or 4 times out of 10.

However, after I subsequently inserted a hard disk the error messages seems to have gone away, although I admittedly haven’t cycled it anywhere near as many times.

Other possibly relevant info is that the bios version appears to be fairly old; 1.04.

Does this sound familiar to anybody? Any advice?

[RealBlackStuff]

Since you bought it on eBay, it's probably heavily used and/or beaten up.
Open it up all the way and, after removing all the dust bunnies, clean up/replace the thermal paste between CPU and fan.
Get instructions here: http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/detail. ... MIGR-66749
Then install Middleton's BIOS: http://forum.notebookreview.com/lenovo- ... ost6501443
You can see all the advantages this gives you on that page, most prominent is SATA II speed of the HD/SSD.

[X-Man]

Many thanks for the feedback.

Actually having looked at this further it seems that the fan is entirely dead, but otherwise the machine seems to be in fairly good condition.

Does anybody have a view on the likelihood that a faulty fan could the entire cause of the ‘Thermal Sensing Error’ report?

Also looking for a replacement part on eBay there seems to be a wild range in prices, something in the order of 1x-10x! Does anybody have a suggestion for a good source, and an estimate of the difficulty of carrying out the repair myself?

[X-Man]

BTW can anybody recommend a good diagnostics tool now that PC Doctor is apparently no longer available?