Well it amazed me that this is a typical issue. My Toshiba M400 the other day was running really warm during normal use, 60° C-70° C. So of course I had to take the whole thing apart and inspect. The first thing I did was to clean out the FAN, again a big yuck! Then I took off the CPU fan and heat sink and removed all the old CPU paste. I then cleaned the surfaces with Isopropyl alcohol, re-applied some new thermal paste, making sure that it is evenly coating the CPU and then re-assembled the notebook. So now my idle temperatures are more inline with when I got the notebook, 35° C-45° C. Here is a good article I found on the topic .
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...