OK I'm pissed. This is twice now. I'm not sure what to suspect. Maybe the powersupply is not good. But the machines worked. I bought a thinkpad 760el. I had it for 4 hours when it died. I bought another parts machine and took what was good out of the first and put it all in the second (hd/battery/cd/floppy/memory)
I had it running for two day mostly on the battery but when I took it to workand was attempting to make it a linux box it died just like the first. But I noticed the sucker was really hot and was running it off the powersupply. Are these things prone to overheating. I suspect the dc converters in both burned up. The first just clicks the second won't do anything. Or could it be the powersupply overloading. Don't have a meter anymore to check the output.

Hi...


I don't think they are, as such ... in my old work
environment we had several of these boxes in
use for people as their main workstation, and they
ran of the power-supply with no sweat 8 to 10 hours
a day. However, the machines have now certainly
come of age (older 4/5 years) and I don't know
what age does to them. The only idea that comes
to my mind is that maybe they were meant for a
different country environment, like being dragged
from a 110 to a 130 V country, or 220 to 250...

Cheers,
Tink

heating is normal on laptops i got a dell inspiron 2650 running redhat and its manual says you can even burn your legs seriusly

Ummm ... we're talking about Pentium machines
here :) ... older than 4 or 5 years

Cheers,
Tink

Are you serious??

Cage47, I like your signature

Older thinkpads definitely overheat.

I have a friend who did sysadmin in Portugal and he said that every night he'd put the Thinkpads (wrapped up in sealed bags) in the freezer. With mine ( a newer one), if I put a freezer gelpack on the base I can see the performance improve.

The problem is that the bottom of the computers are big heat sinks (that's also why they call them thinkpads, not IBM laptops - that could do some damage on yer lap! Hehe).

Keep the damn things cooled down and they'll run for miles. Have you got them working again or are they doorstops now?

yes i was beening serious here is the part from manual page 9

do not allow your potable computer to operate with the base resting directly on exposed skin for extended periods of time.the surface temperature of the base will rise during normal operation.allowing sustained contact with exposed skin can cause discomfort or eventually a burn.

The newer 'notebook' computers (they're not called laptops anymore either) have serious heat problems! Think about the processors - 1.2GHz - without a heavy duty fan !?!?! Flip the thing over and fry some eggs on that!

There was a case in South Africa where a laptop blew up and another that burn some idiots wedding tackle (at least he won't reproduce any more dimwits for a while though!).

Q*Bert

Well Q, I've got two thinkpads. One is a 760el and one is a 760eld. (Only diff between the two is the bios in the keyboard that makes it either an el or eld) Anyway. The first one is totally fried. Nothing has made a difference. It appears the dc-dc converter is totally fried. But after sitting for a week I got the eld back running. No real damage. (Thank god) I did some reading and yes these things are prone to high temps, but what made the diff was I was using a 3com nic AND an older epson 14.4 modem. The recommendation is not to keep these in the machine until you use them as they cause excess heating on top of the normal system heat. SO that's what caused the problem. I've gotten the eld running and gave it an all-night-on test and it's fine but the el is toast. SO I've taken most of the good parts from the two and am going to sell it. I would keep using it myself but linux us a bugger to setup on this when I read it isn't hard. I can get around the non-booting cd but the display is harder than I've read to setup. Even after trying all recommendations online. I'm going back to a toshiba when I sell this one. Thing I'm glad is I got it running so I could wipe my personal data off the hard drive and I can sell it complete. Thing I am pissed at, My fault, the 12" display from the eld fell off the desk and is now doa so I've gotta use the 11.3" display from the el. But it's going on e-bay tomorrow.

I had less problems with the old Toshiba T1910cs I sold. It was a beast at only 33mhz but never once had a glitch with it and never went without either the modem or the nic in it.

Labtops or notebook computers uses heat sink tube technology for the highest heat dissipation efficiency than tranditional active heatsinks found in desktops and servers. IBM probably did not calculate for full processor usage for long periods so the computer gets very hot -- close to maximum temp. You can try installing software that slows down speed of the processor (usually its the front side bus) so that it doesn't reach high temperatures. Another way to correct the problem is find some minature fans with the smallest spindle and add them in the notebook computer. The smaller the spindle for the fans the less heat it dissipates and less heat that traps near the spindle. Use 4500 RPM hard drives instead of 5400 RPM. You may need to run a program so it can slow down the hard drive too. You may need to upgrade the heat sink tube so that is more efficient.

If you need more space take out the battery because you said that you are using the converter. Batteries also adds heat to the notebook computer.


I heard Toshiba notebooks are very good.

In the thinkpad the cpu is directly underneath the dc-dc converter. And there is a little transformer on the converter (this isn't the adapter that's separate) and in the 760, there is a knockout in the motherboard itself that the transformer fits through (without touching) and the cpu is directly beneath this. Just about dead center in the back 1/3 of the machine. But there's really no place to put in a mini fan (aside from taking out the battery, but what's the use) Laptops aren't famous for having lots of room under their covers.

Thing is, the first machine that fried, I had made a full install of Debian but had a pain getting x setup and my sound was a bugger. I decided it wasn't worth the bother and went to put win95 back in. I was in the process of the reinstall of my programs, was installing Uninstaller at the time when it died. The second machine froze while installing some utils. I had it running for two days when it happened. But it runs fine now. But yeah, I took out the motherboard of the fried one. The entire bottom of the board has a long metal plate that acts as the heat sink. No real air flow.

methinks this may be my problem. i would appreciate opinions. i just bought a thinkpad T22 2647-JU0 used on ebay. it came with a 2nd hd that just for kicks i was going to try linux on. i had pretty good success with kanotix as far as all the autodetect stuff. i had some issues getting my acx100 junky wireless card to work, but eventually it did. anyways, on fresh installs of both fedora core 3 and kanotix, after a while, the computer would begin to 'click' on the left side of the machine where the cpu and pcmcia slot was. this wasn't a sound thru the speakers, but something in hardware. i also noticed when this 'click' came around, the wlan card got hot, and the whole computer seemed excessively warm, but the cpu fan would never run full tilt. i even tried one of those notebook stands that allows air flow under the machine. this seemed to help a bit, but nonetheless, the 'click' came back. i put the winXP back in the machine and i can leave it running for hours on a flat table and the same card never 'clicks'. has anyone ever heard of anything specifically like this? can a wireless nic card 'click' if it has some type of heat issue? all the times it happened, the card would continue to work after everything cooled down some. ideas? thanks

i should have asked this in my earlier reply, but as i understand this thread, if you're going to put linux on a laptop, there's going to be heat issues unless you set up and configure the software to slow processor & HD down, etc to take away from the amount of heat that is generated, correct? this is very disappointing. my thinkpad is basically my primary machine. i'd love to be able to run some flavor of linux on it without burning everything up. once again, any pointers would be greatly appreciated. thanks

I have a slick little thinkpad x20. It ran win2k flawlessly for a long time. Then win2k started wigging out, so I attempted to re-install (some of you know that ibm puts a hidden partition on the things to aid in recovering). Anyway the whole thing, top to bottom, start to finish, failed. The best part is that it didnt come with OS cds', only 'recovery' cds. Bloody mess. No help from either IBM or M-soft - another story, but don't ever expect these jokers to support you after a warranty expires - sons of b's wanted me to call back at 10 cents a minute just to ask a question..!!!!

So i put on debian, and it seemed to run hot - it spat out CONAIR blowdryer style heat from the side - nearly melted my mouse and definitely caused global warming. I re-did a very slim kernel and added full support for apm. Still runs abit hot, but i think normal. Oh, and if using gnome - turn off the screensavers and just let it blank out - those things run the cpu mad.

cheers & goodluck.