9.10 and sudden reboots on a Lenovo T60 thinkpad

[Smoot Carl-Mitchell]

On Thu, 2010-03-04 at 12:03 -0800, NoOp wrote:
> On 03/04/2010 05:55 AM, Bill Moseley wrote:

> > Nope.  Plus, this is not a normal OS shut-down.  Yesterday, for example, I
> > was composing an email in Chrome/Gmail and the screen just when black and
> > within a second the Thinkpad's BIOS splash screen displayed.  As if the
> > machine was off and I just turned it on to start it up.    Nothing to
> > indicate it was restarting or halting or anything in the logs I could see.
> 
> Still might be a temp issue. Had nearly exact same issue on one of my
> old desktops. Finally did get a critical temp msg in bios; ended up
> pulling the cpu fan etc., cleaning & reapplying new thermal
> grease/heatsink compound. The old stuff was baked to the point it was
> like clay. No issues since.

Just to clarify, I have had sudden shutdowns which both appear in the
logs (e.g. the OS catches the temperature reading) and where there are
no log messages at all.  I am sure it is a temperature probe being
misread somewhere, since my laptop is not overheating.  I went so far as
to put lm-sensors on the box and take all the temperature readings every
5 minutes.  The temperature is very stable and quite low. (cpu temp is <
60C and usually down in the 40s except under heavy load when it can get
in the high 60s until the fan kicks in)

The thermal system seems to be very good on the T61 except for the
errant sensor readings.  I too have regreased the CPU, blown the fan
out, etc without much luck in solving the problem.  Fortunately, it only
seems to cause problems when the battery is charging.  I suspect the
errant probe is the one that checks the battery temperature, but
lm-sensors shows everything is normal.

Again if you do a Google search, you will see a lot of threads talking
about this issue.  No one has come up with a good solution, yet.


-- 
Smoot Carl-Mitchell
Computer Systems and
Network Consultant
smoot at tic.com
+1 480 922 7313
cell: +1 602 421 9005