Thinkpads Forum

If you're refering to the "tubes" as the heatpipes... Those are sealed
You also should be using compressed air, either in a can (*Refrigerant to be specific), a regulated supply of compressed air or a photography blower bulb... Not a vacuum.

A drawback of using compressed air is that you may lodge dust further into your machine, where it no longer can be dislodged.

You cleaned the fan area on the inside already and it's still hot?! Unless there's a birds nest in there it should be running cool by now! Let's see... your fan is working... you've cleaned the fan blades and fan bay area... it seems like you may have some kind of hardware or software issue then.

I've never undervolted before (it does sound intriguing and beneficial however) but you shouldn't have to. The temps that people have posted indicate this.

Hmmm... have you tried loading a Linux LiveCD and seeing how the temps go with that? If it is a Windows issue then the Linux OS should have different temp results than Windows. That will rule out software.

Those temps are nothing, I had my chip-modded z60t running 95C under load w/ Linux Mint for a few weeks before I cleaned out the heatsink. It actually looked pretty clean on the outside, but when I took off the fan there was a solid layer of dust clogging up the exhaust vents.

Smek. I'm not so sure everyone wants to be holding a hot potato!

Personally I expect that a laptop will get warm while giving it a workout. The only time I saw high temps was my former T30 when I was transcoding VOB to AVI. That made my T30 temps, with 1.8 P4, go up to around 80 degrees Celsius. What I really would like is the reassurance that my laptop has been engineered ingeniously to disperse the heat efficiently. So far the T400 I have is doing wonderfully in those respects

Update:
I removed my keyboard and used the compressed air to blow the dust off. Dust bunnies visibly came out. Now I can feel the airflow out of the vents so that definitely helped. Also using TP Fan Control I can now manually set the fan to a higher speed. I think on the default setting my fan doesn't even turn on until CPU temps get to around 60C which is kinda crazy. Any way I can change the default speeds to something more aggressive so I don't have to manually keep adjusting fan speed (say every time I turn a game on)?

Anyway, thanks for all those who helped.

Knew it was dust.