x30 overheating

[CHood]

I have an x30 that is overheating and locking up.

TO get it to run stable I have to prop it up and have 2 inches air space under it and the ambiant temp around 65 F.

Are there any known problems that make these things run hotter when they age? I have seen some posts of possible dirty vents but on the outside this machine is clean and has never been around pets or carpet.

I am willing to take it apart just to make sure she is clean inside if someone will link me a service instruction .pdf file or something

Any ideas?

[jonnnny]

Hmm I've never heard of a thinkpad overheat with age... but dust build up in the fan could be a possible problem.

Undervolting might help by lowering the temperature a few degrees, but from the sound of it, there's something else up.

[ibmfan]

Yes you can open it and check out if inside is dirty with dust, but X30 is a hot machine especially on summer or at a close place which is not ventilative, some fans say you can use it as a burner at winter that just put it on your lap so you can image how 'warm' it is.

Another solution is that you find a small fan to blow this machine when it's working, & this is what I do sometimes.

[kodell]

I don't really know what you mean when you say it's overheating and locking up - if the fan comes on and runs all the time, then the below might be relevant. It might also be that it's locking up when running at temperatures it's designed for - if you're lucky it could be a memory chip or something easy to replace. (Do you any have no-name memory cards?) If you're unlucky it's a chip on the motherboard. You can diagnose this kind of thing with a can of cold spray, but it can be time consuming and frustrating if it's intermittent. Knowing the specific temperatures you're seeing that it's locking up at would be a help.

If it's in fact getting too hot, either it's consuming too much power or not dissipating it well enough:

Not dissipating it:
Poor thermal connectivity between heat sink and CPU – could someone have removed heat sink & reinstalled improperly?
Excess dust – not all that likely, unit is sealed pretty well. You could take the keyboard off & blow any dust out & verify that the heat sink looked like it was seated properly. I wouldn’t disassemble it more than that except to reseat the heat sink & only that after I've tried everything else.

Consuming too much power:
I would make sure the CPU is set for dynamic SpeedStep switching on both battery and AC. Download something like Notebook Hardware Control and check the temperatures of both the hard disk and cpu. Check power usage from battery maximizer – your usage should be around 10 watts. Under normal use (office applications, email, web surfing) the CPU should be < 50 degrees C & the fan should pretty much never come on.

Failing hard disks can heat up with no additional problems; some replacement hard disks do run much hotter. Having adequate memory to limit paging/defragging/making sure there’s no program that is doing a lot of disk accesses also help (a little - the disk will spin no matter what).

Some 3rd party wireless cards also consume more power than the system was designed for. Are you using any other peripherals that might be consuming power?

I don’t think the x30 runs hotter than any similar laptop – IBM has managed to eke out a pretty respectable running time out of a relatively modest battery – so it’s not really using that much power/creating much heat.