T60 fan at high seed when running on battery

Hello,

I got my new T60 (2007-62F) yesterday, and the fan is
is kind of strange. When running with the AC adapter
plugged-in, the fan will run at around 3000 rpm, pretty
quiet.

However when I unplug the the AC adapter and run
from the battery then the fan will get to ±3900 rpm
within a few secs and stay there, even if the system is
idling. As soon as I plug the AC adapter back, the fan
rev go down again to ±3000 rpm.

I installed tpfancontrol to check the fan speed and the
temperatures seem all normal.

I called Lenovo support, and they told me to upgrade
to the latest BIOS, and if it didn't solve the issue to
bring it in for repair. I did the BIOS upgrade (from 1.05a
to 1.07) but it made no difference. Any suggestions
before I return the T60 for repair ?

P.S. I have a standard config (T2500, X1400, SXGA+ 14.1", 100GB drive),
save for memory : 2X 1GByte

 

Have you checked the Power Management profiles (the ones that are in the ThinkVantage suite)? There's a setting in there that lets you set if the fan's adaptive or set for max. performance, depending on the power source. I don't have my T60 with me or I'd tell you exactly where that setting is.

 

smith,

the profile selectd is "Thinkpad default", in that profile
the fan is configured for max performance when
plugged-in, and adaptive when on battery.

 

I'll leave the T60 at the local depot for repair. I tried to
tinker with the thinkpad power management, but it just
doesn't make any sense. The profiles in there seem
logical, but the laptop behaves the opposite way it
should.

Also, the bluetooth transmitter is either missing or
defective.

Hopefully everything will get fixed with a single trip to
the repair shop.

 

isn't the tpfancontrol software written for thinkpad T4x series? I'm pretty sure it is.

 

Here is my response on the other forum:

One thing I noticed from my t60 back in march, was the power profiles in the bios differed for both battery and AC, and as such somewhat changed the bios's cooling profile for each. I too noticed the increased fan usage on mine, and after changing the profiles to match eachother both AC and battery had the same style. Fan speeds went down, didn't throttle up as much, and was more pleasant using it in school.

This doesn't prevent the thing from any cpu frequency scaling, jsut changes its cooling profile. All the battery saving stuff can still be played with in the ibm utility in windows.

 

santasballz,

Yes tpfancontrol doesn't list the T60 as supported,
however I'm using it in monitor mode to check the fan
speed and the temp of various components of the laptop,
and the values reported seem O.K. Do you have a
better program in mind ?

dietcokefiend,

I also noticed that if I changed the fan control parameter
on battery to match the value configured while on AC
(from balance all parameters to maximize performance),
the fan speed would stay the same at ±3000 rpm.
It just doesn't seem logical to me.

Also, on the bluetooth issue I mentionned above, when
I called Lenovo support, they had me check a few thing
in the Win hardware config and concluded the T60
needed repair. I kept exploring (this is my first ThinkPad
and also my first real experience with XP, I'm still using
w2k at the office) and found out in Fn+F5 that the
bluetooth device was disabled ! I turned it on an Windows
discovered the new hardware and installed the drivers.
I could then upgrade the firmware and the software.

And on the high speed fan issue there are quite a few
threads on forum.thinkpads.com that I have to read.
After reading a few, I think my laptop is on the average.
I'll do some more testing the next few days and report
my findings.