Thinkpads Forum

My T400 gets really warm from the area right of the touchpad, where I rest my right palm when I'm using the trackpoint. This is the only part of the laptop that doesn't stay cool, (and also the only part for which it matters if it stays cool or not).

Using the laptop as it is is extremely unpleasant - is there anything that could be done for the heat?

This may be totally unrelated, but mine was very warm there too, and my CPU usage - even when idling - was spiking to 30-50% every couple of seconds by access connections (you can only see that it is the culprit by viewing as admin) ..until I followed advice I read here somewhere to remove the AC notifier from the taskbar.

Open Access Connections as administrator... go to Tools -> Global Settings -> Notifications.

I have unchecked both icon tray options. I can't remember which one or both did it, but there was an immediate end to all the CPU usage, which now pretty much remains flat on the bottom at idle, and I don't feel the heat under my right palm, either.

Might be worth a try.

That would be your hard drive. I have a Hitachi Travelstar 320 GB 7200 RPM in my T400 and it stays cool.

Thank you for the answers.

I'll try removing the AC notifier once I'll get home but I'm mostly using Linux anyway, so that would only solve half of the problem.

It really seems however that the HDD is the one to blame. Quite interesting that a 7200rpm drive stays cool but a 5400rpm drive doesn't, wouldn't expect to find low quality HDD's pre-installed in ThinkPads... Anyway, I'm planning to replace the original HDD with a 60GB OCZ Vertex SSD, this would probably solve the heat issue? I would then replace the optical drive with the removed HDD using Hard Drive Bay Adapter II. With this configuration, I could have Vista and Ubuntu (and probably another Linux or Win XP) and the most commonly used applications on the SSD and everything else on the HDD.

Would this configuration work? Any opinions..?

Most likely Vista is causing the HDD to heat up because services like Superfetch, Indexing Service etc.
Try disabling them.

I can't recall my HDD heating up that much under Vista. If you want to run multiple OS's, I highly recommend Sun's VirtualBox.

wswartzendruber wrote:That would be your hard drive. I have a Hitachi Travelstar 320 GB 7200 RPM in my T400 and it stays cool.

Using the exact same drive here and it's nice and cool too.

I've got a 200GB Seagate at 7200RPM in there, sometimes it gets warm beneath the right of the palm rest (where the HDD is located) but if anything it's my CPU and GPU that get hot. My processor idles around 40degC but my GPU can get well up into the 60degCs when playing games.