You Could Fry an Egg on my T43/p

[Internaut92103]

Lately, my T43p has been getting really hot ... I mean an HDD temp gauges it regularly at over 100F.

Ambient room temperatures have been higher lately ... around 80-82F ... we really don't use air-conditioning here at home ...

Could the room temperature cause such a noticeable increase in hard drive temperature? That is, with a room temp of 75F, the hard drive operates in the low to mid-90s, and a 5-degree room temperature increases causes a 10-degree increase in hard drive temp?

I've been putting a fan on it, which seems to help, but the other day it wouldn't seem to cool down at all, regardless of external measures ... I had to shut down and came back the next day.

So, um ... is this normal, and can I change the internal fan to operate more often, at a higher speed? Other suggestions?

Thank you.

[aaa]

TPFanControl

But, (after converting to the Celsius I'm used to around computers), it doesn't seem like an unusual temperature.

[KristianJ]

Yeah - your high temps convert to only about 36-37 degrees C, so I would have to assume you really mean Fahrenheit...

[gunston]

well,
as a T43 user, i couldn't deny that underneath the touchpad is getting "hot" especially with WiFi turn on.

it is the PCI-X300 AT and wifi card generating heat together

[Wiz]

It seems like the main problem for a lot of T43 users is the CPU and GPU and if those two is very hot other components will be warmer as well and the fan might be even more noisy then normal. You could try tpfancontol to monitor your system and see what is the main problem and optionally use it to make the fan run faster, but that will probably make the computer pretty noisy. You could use tpfancontrol to make the fan more silent as well, but that will only make your computer warmer.
Another option is to use the notebook hardware control. Then you could lower the CPU voltage and also control the GPU. Using NHC you can also control the fan since the T43 fan is pretty noisy in general. I have a T43p that became very warm and started to use NHC that made a big difference for me. The temp is now much lower and the fan is much more silent then it used to be without NHC.
If you never had this problem before and started recently maybe there is some other issues like dust you could remove or some program you started to use that use a lot of CPU running in the background. Hard to tell, but without notebook hardware control i found my T43p to be way to warm and noisy from the day i got it.

[coreman]

Ambient temperature has a huge impact on air cooling...the cooling air you pull into the notebook comes from the room. The closer the room air temp is to the natural HDD temp, the less it will cool.

I can easily see where an increase of only 7F or so in the ambient temp of the room would lead to 10F or higher HDD temps and as Wiz pointed out, is probably exacerbated by an increase in GPU/CPU heat due to hotter ambient air which increases the overall temp inside the enclosure... especially true if you live in dusty environment and some of the exhaust holes are clogged...

What would surprise me is if you can fry an egg at this temp...