T61 idling at 55 degrees Celsius... too hot?

[jikuty]

Hi guys.

I was wondering if you could give me some input as to what normal operating temperatures should be for my laptop. It's a T61 766416U with a Core 2 Duo T7300 (2.0GHz) processor and a 128mb Quadro NVS140M graphics card (the full specs can be found at http://www5.pc.ibm.com/us/products.nsf/ ... p/_766416U).

When I bought the laptop two years back, I seem to remember it running a lot cooler, especially when using it lightly (when doing web browsing, etc). Nowadays, the bottom of the laptop becomes uncomfortably hot after a short while. I'm primarily using Ubuntu 9.04, but the temperature is similar with Vista. When running Ubuntu, the PC is always idling around 55-60 degrees Celsius.

Is this normal? And if not, is there an easy way to fix the problem? I still have a year left on the warranty, so do you think sending it to Lenovo would be helpful?

Thanks.

[dr_st]

It could be something as simple as just cleaning the dust in the fan and the grilles. Very simple, just remove the keyboard and palmrest, and use compressed air or similar.

If that doesn't help, it could mean that there is some degradation in the fan or the heatsink, or the thermal pad between the heatsink and the CPU/GPU. In which case, Lenovo can and will fix it under warranty.