@ markush, TobiSGD, schmatzler,
Taking into consideration your suggestions I’ll refresh the entire cooling system. My problem has a broader perspective. I use three ThinkPad machines (in the post #5 I apparently misinterpreted the date of the release of my oldest ThinkPad):
1. T40 made August, 2003.
2. T60 made June, 2007.
3. X60s made May, 2007.
I bought all of them secondhand.
The T40 is well designed machine apart of the location of the fan that heats the left palm.
The T60 had two years of warranty when I bought it. During these two years the service replaced broken fan two times. So it seems the fans are the Achilles’ heel of T60 ThinkPads.
The X60s is a very small laptop. The parts inside are stuffed tightly. As a result it’s hot all the time especially from below and under the right palm.
That year the fans in all of these machines started to fail. I cleaned up and oiled the fans in T40 and T60. The T40 fan works silently now. The T60 fan produces some noise. As for X60s – the machine I like the most despite of the flaws of the design – I didn’t decide to disassemble it completely in order to clean and oil the fan so I put it away till I’ll buy a brand new fan.
The last year all these machines started to shutdown randomly when I don’t use them (at night). I couldn’t determine the cause of these shutdowns though I suspected the overheating. I confirmed that hypothesis trying to upgrade the packages on T40 and seeing the message about reaching the critical temperature. The /var/log/messages file registers only shutdown in such a case:
Code:
Sep 19 04:17:42 home logger: ACPI group processor / action CPU0 is not defined
Sep 19 04:17:53 home shutdown[10852]: shutting down for system halt
Sep 19 04:17:53 home logger: ACPI group thermal_zone / action THM0 is not defined
Sep 19 04:17:53 home init: Switching to runlevel: 0
Sep 19 04:17:53 home logger: ACPI group processor / action CPU0 is not defined
The other log files don’t register any relevant information.
The bottom line is I should refresh the entire cooling systems in all my machines. It’ll be expensive taking into consideration the prices of the secondhand ThinkPads but I don’t see the alternative.
The modern machines – including ThinkPads – don’t meet my demands. Old ThinkPads have three strong points: non-reflective 4:3 size screen, keyboard layout similar to the traditional keyboard, and very precise TrackPoint. All modern machines have so called “wide screens” and only some Dell Precision models offer the traditional keyboard including TrackPoint. (The modern ThinkPads in the best case have Insert key in a wrong place.)
Thank you guys for your kind assistance.