Comment 38 for bug 751689

Guys, I have had same problems with all versions of Ubuntu (from 10.04 till 11.10). Used thinkfan to control and put in disengaged mode, the only way to cool things.

Funny end of the story, turned out to be the a dirty cooling unit. All thinkpads has quite good dissipating units, but they tend to be clogged extremely easily. Moreover, some dust get into my fan and was vibrating, so I disassembled entire dissipating block, cleaned tons of dust that was stuck in the dissipator, properly lubricated entire fan unit with some WD40 (circuit friendly), and the result is incredible. I live in the tropics and sometimes I use my T400 without AC. When doing normal activity, fan always throttle normally as it should do. If I use max performance, it will go to the top admitted by auto (which is never same as disengaged in thinkpads) and temperature will slowly increase and stay steady at no more than 70C (GPU too) even if room temp is nearly 30C.

Thinkpad fan is purely controlled by the BIOS. You can install all sort of utilities to manually control the speed, but nothing beats BIOS settings, that are working properly with a clean unit.

If anybody has the problem with a perfectly clean unit, then please report it here.