Lenovo ThinkPad Z61t running hot , is it?

I bought a refurbished Lenovo ThinkPad Z61t. It came with Ubantu OS installed. It looks and runs well , however it seems to run quite hot. Earlier I used TP X200 and compared to that this runs quite hot. I checked the Ubantu inbuilt Sys info. to see CPU temperature and this is what I get

Sensors
ACPI Thermal Zone
THM1 95°C
THM0 98°C

Is it normal or its really running hotter then normal?

Thanks

 

No, those temperatures are absolutely max. temperaturs. In idle they should be around 50 degrees celcius.

 

The temperatures are well above normal, you should consider cleaning the vents and CPU fan to increase air flow in the system. Also check if the thermal paste on the CPU is in good order, if it feels hard or is cracking off then you should consider reapplying some fresh thermal paste on the CPU.

 

what CPU does this machine have?

 

Processor : Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0Ghz T7200

 

time to give the heatsink a clean, and reapply a thin layer of good quality thermal paste.

The T7xxx series do run quite hot in the Z61t, i personally settled for a T5500 in my Z61t. Normally when the T7xxx CPU get stressed in the Z61t the temp would hover at around 75 to 80 degrees mark (room temp around 20 degrees, with the fan spinning at max speed).

 

How easy/hard to do that? Do I need to dis-mental the whole thing or just few panels?

 

it is fairly easy, you just need to remove palmrest, keyboard, speaker bezel, left speaker, and the heatsink.

You can follow the hardware manual on the complete disassembly process,

Lenovo Support - Hardware Maintenance Manual - ThinkPad Z61t

 

It may sound stupid, but is your fan working at all?

Also, how is you CPU usage looking? Is there any load on it?

 

fan1: 2823 RPM

CPU 1 & CPU 2 are close to 50% use when I play some Youtube , 5-6 Tabls on Chrome..and 1 Word, 1 excel window.

Is there an easy way to make fan run more often. At present I barely hear fan running noise. May be that's the whole problem.

 

download tpfancontrol and you can make the fan run at mode 7.

 

It's for windows. I didn't find for Ubantu

 

ThinkFan is what I'm using on Arch Linux.

 

Followed this
http://jaysherby.blogspot.com/2010/05/thinkfan-in-ubuntu-karmic.html

This is how my file /etc/default/thinkfan looks

# Should thinkfan be started automatically on boot?
# Only say "yes" when you know what you are doing, have configured
# thinkfan correctly for *YOUR* machine and loaded thinkpad_acpi
# with fan_control=1 (if you have a ThinkPad).
START=YES

# Additional startup parameters
DAEMON_ARGS="-q"


Should I also uncomment following line

# with fan_control=1 (if you have a ThinkPad).

 

fan_control=1 means that you are allowing your fan to be controlled by you or any app installed by you.
fan_control=0 means it's read only, if that makes sense.

In your case (Ubuntu) this setting should go to
/etc/modprobe.d/options:
options thinkpad_acpi fan_control=1
reboot

You can find more here: How to control fan speed - ThinkWiki

 

I don't have /etc/modprobe.d/options file !

These are the files I have in that folder

user@user-laptop:/etc/modprobe.d$ pwd
/etc/modprobe.d


user@user-laptop:/etc/modprobe.d$ ls -lt
total 32
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 41 2010-12-06 17:00 blacklist-oss.conf -> /lib/linux-sound-base/noOSS.modprobe.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 325 2010-04-14 00:26 blacklist-ath_pci.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1603 2010-04-14 00:26 blacklist.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 213 2010-04-14 00:26 blacklist-firewire.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 660 2010-04-14 00:26 blacklist-framebuffer.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1077 2010-04-14 00:26 blacklist-watchdog.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2386 2010-01-28 19:01 alsa-base.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 156 2010-01-28 19:01 blacklist-modem.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 16 2010-01-06 03:12 libpisock9.conf

 

I believe options file is a random name in this case, you should be able to use your own.. e.g. thinkpad.conf

sudo echo "options thinkpad_acpi fan_control=1" > /etc/modprobe.d/thinkpad.conf

but before that, make sure you have ibm-acpi enabled... try

ls /proc/acpi/ibm/

do you see any files there? like fan?

On my x200 I have:

[oct@localhost ~]$ cat /proc/acpi/ibm/fan
status: enabled
speed: 3786
level: auto

Do you see similar output?

 

Yes I do have /proc/acpi/ibm like this

user@user-laptop:/etc/modprobe.d$ ls /proc/acpi/ibm/
beep cmos driver fan hotkey led light thermal video volume

user@user-laptop:/proc/acpi/ibm$ cat fan
status: enabled
speed: 2814
level: auto

 

Good. Then you should be able to create /etc/modprobe.d/thinkpad.conf for example, which will contain:

options thinkpad_acpi fan_control=1

reboot and after that you'll be able to control fan levels... either by yourself or using some kind of script.

Just be careful, don't turn it off or set a really low level.. go from 3 to 7