Average Temperature for R40?

[ag_inspector]

Hello,

I inherited an R40. It is my first thinkpad, and I love it! It does get hot though. What is the normal operating temperature for this model? The CPU temp is consistently around 60-65 C. Also the bottom right gets hot as well. Is this to be expected? Should I purchase a notebook cooler?

[Terrahawk]

Your R40 has a Pentium 4-M CPU. I wouldn't be surprised if it idled at about 50 degrees and got to over 75 degrees under heavy load. I have Pentium-M based R40 and the CPU idles at 35 degrees, sits at 45 degrees at moderate load and can climb to over 75 degrees under heavy loading.

[Phazer]

Mine hoovers around 45-50 wih light usage, basic internet browsing and such.

[kajencik]

Hello,

here is my temperature experience:

R40 - pentium M - undervolted, temperatures like Terrahawk wrote

R40e - celeron 4-m 2,4 GHz - this one gets really hot, even with smoothly running CPU fan and newly applied thermal paste (not arctic silver, I admit, I just had some generic one...) - it iddles about 50 celsius and when in the bed and under fully load, exceeds 80 from time to time. Before swapping the fan and aplying thermal paste, it even encoutered several shutdowns due to overheating. I plan to use pentium 4-M 1,6 in this one, the computing difference is not so big (even compared to the celeron ) and the temperature is anoying

Possible solutions for you, sorted from eaiser to harder

1) dont use it in bed or something similar, just on the flat, rough surface, like normal desk.

2) You could indeed buy a cooling pad to put under the laptop

3) You CPU is 2,0 GHz, it can run quite hot, you can try to lower the cpu clock for example to 1,8 Ghz for all the time, it should lower the temperature and not take away much CPU power

4) Diassemble the laptop, it's easy if you take a look into a HMM (hardware maintenance manual - downloadable at lenovo website, you actually needs only to remove the keyboard and the plastic behind it and you can remove the fan - i've done it at least five or six times now, without any problem or damage) - remove the CPU fan, clean it from dust and from old thermal paste, also clean the CPU, aply new paste - preferably arctic silver 5 - and there you go,

also check the fan if it spins good, it should turn very easily, if not, buy a new one from ebay, they are cheap nowadays, especially comapred to new CPU / motherboard

IMHO, you don't have to be scared, my R40e powered down quite a numerous time and nothing happened to it at all, but cooler is definitely better.

Just to add - the R50p I have also already powered down when playing far cry in the bed, but this is a design problem with the GPU cooling - the R50p CPU is at most 72*C while the GPU in the bed was over 100*C when it powered down - just to see how hot can thinkpads go

[ajkula66]

These CPUs, as everyone has already stated, tend to run quite hot.

I suggest running some type of utility to monitor and adjust your fan settings. There are quite a few threads around here dealing with such programs, especially for the T43/p which are likely the hottest runing ThinkPads ever, and, yes, you can use these on your R40 with no fear.

Good luck.