w500 is running hot. Video goes blank and unit shuts down

[balanceact]

My W500 from 2003 has served me well but is now giving me problems. The unit seem hotter that usual and especially when watching a video, it will, after 15-30 min, make a short grunt sound and then the screen goes blank and the unit shuts down.

Any suggestions for what to do? I have the ATI Mobility FireGL V5700 w/ 512 MB video card. My battery is dead so I'm always plugged in.

Thanks, balanceact

[RealBlackStuff]

Take the fan out, remove the dust bunnies, clean all the gunk from fan and CPU, then apply fresh thermal paste, preferably AS5.
AS5 instructions: http://www.arcticsilver.com/pdf/appmeth ... d_v1.1.pdf
After reinstall it should work fine again.

[balanceact]

Thanks Mr. Guinness,

I'll take you up on all those suggestions!

[balanceact]

I have looked for a good video that will give me access to the fan and heat sink/CPU for my ThinkPad w500. I have not found any that are very useful.

Could someone recommend a specific YouTube video, one for my machine (all the undersides have different configurations)?

And a video where the person actually talks and helps one through the process of getting into this laptop instead of just removing screws and pulling out parts without naming them.

Thanks, balanceact

[Hans Gruber]

A T500 is basically the same as your W500 as far as taking it apart goes.
https://youtu.be/1UHw8qhgnRw

[TPFanatic]

This youtuber's T500 video is alright as well, I think. He talks and points out where the screws that need to be removed are. It's an Intel GMA T500 but the disassembly is the same as your W500.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQjlbwnHMKc

[MisterB]

It is not very difficult to disassemble a W500. I bought 3 of them over the last month. To get to the heat sink fan assembly you just have to remove the palmrest, keyboard and keyboard bezel in that order. It took me all of 10 minutes. After that, you have full access to the fan and heat sink assembly and can clean the fan or remove the whole assembly. I found it very similar to the T60/T61 inside but even easier to disassemble and reassemble.

[balanceact]

Thanks to all who offered advice. I finally took apart my thinkpad, basically from the top (5 screws from the bottom). I just vacuumed out the fan, making sure to stabilize it before vacuuming so I wouldn't over spin it. There was a lot of dust in it. I didn't pull off the heat sink as I didn't want to risk having problems reinstalling it with new thermal compound.

Since then it has run without any excess heat and doesn't shut down.

BUT, just before I fixed the overheating problem, the search function of the windows button (with the rippling flag of four white squares) stopped working. When I type in the name of an file whose name I know exactly, it says, "No matching items found".

I'm not sure the overheating had anything to do with this. Is this a ThinkPad problem or a windows problem?? any ideas on how to go about fixing this?