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...