Thanks, Trihexagonal. For some odd reason I didn't realize I could use 4GB RAM (great news btw) so I'm at 4GB total which is how it came. I did get a Seagate 7200rpm 320GB hdd at the same time I bought the Thinkpad even though I was a bit worried about temps from such a fast drive. It's acceptable at 45C upon initial boot and login to KDE. GPU idles at around 48C. A heavy compile will take the system to 70C which bothers me but as I keep saying I am obsessed about thermals and it has never frozen up. Those temps just make it not exactly one to use while reclining in bed unless one's electric blanket is on the fritz LOL. If I am fortunate to recover sufficiently my fine motor skills damaged by stroke I will very likely employ a copper shim with Arctic Silver applied as a film to both sides to get a better thermal coupling, and possibly nibble a few chassis holes to improve air intake and overall flow as I have done with every previous laptop I have ever owned. That will very often result in a 10C - 15C reduction but between it's solid operation and my infirmity it is low on my list. I still love it.

enorbet, I use 7200RPM HDD on all my Thinkpads. The T61, X61 and T400 are all supposed to be upgradable to 8GB RAM, though I had bad luck trying to upgrade my T61 and must have got a bad stick. But I know plenty of people have done it. The wiki is a good reference guide for Thinkpads:

Thinkpad Models

I have one I need to take apart and clean because it gets abnormally hot when compiling ports. I use my Opolar Gaming Fan with it when doing so and it really works. It pulls air through the laptop, has a digital temp readout, multiple fan speeds and is well worth having at approximately $30-$35. I got a syslog warning in one of my consoles stating it had reached 100C, plugged in the fan and brought it right down in seconds.

I've got a lot more use out of it compiling ports than gaming.

Touchscreen. Wacom pen included. cheap < used ocz ssd because harddrive was missing >

Total cost . About 59 bucks. Nothing radical here because costs were kept down. Came with no camera. Use a external logitech clip on. Which travels from Laptop to desktop.

I put Linux-Lite/Ubuntu on here because of touchscreen and wacom pen back when 14.04 was current. It was a out of the box everything working experience. This is built like IBM as far as rugged goes. It is not the latest and greatest. But with a SSD and 5 gig of ram.
Nothing to sneeze at either.

Happy Birthday Trihexagonal and get well soon Enorbet. Stroke is no joke. I bet salt has left the building on your diet. At least I bet that is what the docs nag about.
Gallons of fish oil. Ugh.

When you try Salix jax. You will be pleasently surprised. You should be OK with XFCE or Mate version also. I ran SaliX fluxbox and Slackel on my Atom Netbooks with touchscreens. SaliX is as easy to run as Mint in my opinion. But you know how opinions are. They are infinite.

I need to put android i386 on those and put those up for sell on my local hotline < radio show free advertising > to recoup some beer money.

Updates:
- I cleaned the laptop, I added thermal paste and it keeps shutting
- the CPU goes 100% for a very short time while the browser loads a single tab (I deleted cookies & co)
- from 50 C it can go to 80 C in a matter of a couple of seconds and then back to 50 C
- I tried to install Arch Linux and I was getting the "Probing EDD (edd=off to disable)" error

So tell me... how do you type wearing "kitchen mittens"? All joking aside, it is certainly possible that I'm mistaken but it seems to me that a piece of electronic gear designed to be handled by humans is unlikely to idle at 50C and hitting 80C (getting rather close to the boiling point of water) is frankly absurd. This leads me to believe that either there is less than ideal contact between the heatsink(s) and electronics and/or fan(s) are not operating ideally.

Please remember that thermal paste is not a good thermal conductor. It's just better than air. It is designed to be applied in a film, a very thin amount that is only supposed to fill microscopic "pits" where air bubbles are trapped. A thick coating like a wafer of paste or those rather silly injected foam pads are just slightly better than no contact at all. An ideal contact would be metal only which is immediately compromised by the plastic housings of chips and the difficulty (and expense) of perfectly polishing both metal and plastic to match. CPUs commonly have some form of metallic heat spreader to help such surface contact but in mass production it is costly to pair up mating surfaces. This makes the only recourse one of getting the best out of a compromise and usually involves good design for compression springs and bolts (something like cross tightening lug nuts when mounting an automobile wheel) or in some cases User intervention to polish metallic surfaces to extremely flat, mirror like smooth surfaces. That can be difficult, sometimes extremely so, to do to both surfaces with laptops whose CPUs and GPUs may be soldered in place. The risk of electrical contamination from fine metal dust precludes doing good work on the chips in such notebooks, tablets and phones, but the heatsinks can be addressed and "dressed".

I doubt you want to polish your heatsink even though I am so strict about thermals that I do that, but it isn't difficult to at least avoid thick wafers of thermal paste and uneven tightening of compression devices. If it has a fan be certain that it operates properly. There are after market devices that place a high output fan on the exhaust port but that is akin to using a bandage when internal damage exists. The source is better to address even though anything that increases air flow helps and it is a fast, cheap and easy convenience.

Not knowing your mechanical expertise nor your inclinations, and since the Toshiba is all but inoperable in it's present condition it seems to me that the only two possibilities is to carefully get the most out of the thermal removal system or replace the entire unit. Since you have already taken it apart and cleaned it and applied thermal paste it shouldn't be beyond your skill level to improve physical contact by at the very least properly applying the paste or if need be improving the physical contact by removing any obstacles, often only possible by getting and inserting a copper shim (pasted thinly on both sides), and insuring tight springs or evenly tightened bolts whichever you have. A mere 10C improvement could be HUGE and I have seen 20C improvements on a few laptops, especially some budget models... not saying that your is one of those, just noting that manufacturers look to saving mere pennies when considering millions of units, even on the best

Good Luck and I empathize with your difficulty and frustration. "Fingers crossed" it will be a simple solution to getting some improvement.