Case of the bad CPU paste
The other day I ran into an interesting problem with my ThinkPad T60. For some reason the machine would shut down after about 10-30 minutes. There were no indications to the cause from the error in the event logs in Vista, nor were there any obvious hardware sounds.
Lucky for me I had another laptop at my disposal where I could swap the hard disk out to rule out some Vista related bug.
By chance I noticed that the base of the machine was running very hot, the internal heat sink was running about 90° C (using my Fluke infra-red temperature sensor) around when the machine shutdown unexpectedly. So I suspected that the machine was going into thermal shutdown. The Core Duo CPU is rated at about 100° C, but other components on the system board may not be stable at such high temperatures.
So the first thing I did was clean all that dust out of the heat sink and fan, yuk... Then I fired up the laptop again. This time it took the machine significantly longer to shutdown but the problem was the same.
So instead of arguing with some support rep, I took matters into my own hands (literally). I busted open the laptop, took off the heat-sink and cleaned the old paste off. Lucky for me I still had some arctic silver CPU paste leftover from putting a monster of a head sink on my Q6600. Sorry forgot to take some gory ThinkPad T60 pictures. Maybe I will take some pictures when I change the processor to a 2GHz Core Duo that I removed from my Toshiba M400, that's a topic for another post.
Before I digress even more, I am glad to report, the problem is resolved. The machine not longer shuts down and I am a happy camper.
I wonder why Lenovo put so little CPU paste on the CPU.