[ltp] Thermal woes on Thinkpad T60p

[Richard Neill]

Peter Lemken wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> 
> finally managed to snatch a new T60p at a reasonable price. Manufactured 
> in 2006 but left in some obscure dealer's stock until last month I got 
> it with full 3 year on-site service until 2012.
> 
> 
> Which I have had to use twice now, because the machine runs unstable. 
> Playing 3d-games in Windows makes the machine freeze hard after 20 
> minutes or so. Sometimes, somtimes not. When it shut down, it wouldn't 
> start Linux, unable to load the RAM-disk. Leaving it a lone for 
> 15minutes returns everything back to normal. Sometimes the machine 
> completely freezes, particularly when I load graphics in gimp or start 
> google earth. However, this has only happened under Ubuntu so far, not 
> under Mnadriva which I run on a separate partition. Tried installing new 
> radeon drivers from git under Ubuntu, but the problem persisted.
> 

My T60p was also rather prone to crashes of this nature. So far, the 
solution (which seems to work quite well) is:

  (a) update to the latest BIOS and EC firmware. This is actually quite 
a simple process involving burning and booting a CD-image you can 
download from IBM.

  (b) run the graphics card in VESA mode.
         => pity about the nice 3D-accelerated screensavers
         => to make scrolling fast, jump-scroll (pg_dn or space-bar)
            or set the wheel to 10 lines at a time.

  (c) Update to at least Ubuntu Hardy for modern kernel and optimal 
power management.

As for temperatures, the general principle seems to be, if it's too hot 
to touch, you have problems!

Richard