Thinkpads Forum

My T401 is overheating and shutting off while docked. It gets real hot, fan spins at full blast and then bam, it turns off. Yes, I am doing multiple tasks at the same time, compiling code, syncing iTunes, zipping a 1 GB file. My old ThinkPad's never shutdown. Not sure why this one will overheat and shutdown.


Any ideas much appreciated.

100% hot off overheat turns

More info...

When the laptop is docked and you run a multi-process application and max out the processors the laptop will shut down due to thermal overheating.

A quick and easy way to kill the ThinkPad T401 is to run iTunes that is connected to a library on a server, then plug an iPad and sync up the video, music and pictures from your albums. The iPad requires the photo’s to get compressed which requires a significant amount of power from the computer. iTunes leverages the multi processors by spawning 4 iTunesPhotoProcessors as you can see below. Those processes along with the iTunes.exe, AppleMobileDeviceHelper and iTunesHelper cause the laptop to overheat and shutdown. Every single time.

I was also able to reproduce this while zipping a massive 2GB file and compiling code in Visual Studio, working in Excel, email open and copying a file up to our datacenter servers.

Room temperature is 71 degrees about 11:30pm at night in San Diego, CA. Heater is off, regular room temperature. Humidity is typical San Diego, just perfect.

Hi bradhs,

Does your 410 have a discrete graphics processor?
If so, then without switchable graphics takes extra power - always.
But I didn't think it should get so bad as that so as to make it shut down.

- avi

Turn on the AC to max and lowest temp. I find that helps cool electonics. Humidity is a big enemy for electronics. Hard to beleive its cold/cool in SD as near the equator.