93°C

On Friday morning, my laptop started to get warm. This didn't seem unreasonable: it was ripping a CD, moving huge quantities of data off an encrypted partition, spam-filtering 250 mail messages, and rebuilding this site. The CPU had been pegged at 100% for a while and all the mechanical systems had been spinning away. A long while, in fact, as the CPU had stepped back to 600Mhz in an attempt to cool off.

I found it somewhat strange that the fan wasn't roaring along, washing my desk in warmth, but I figured the machine knew what it was doing.

What it was doing was climbing slowly towards 93°C, at which point it said politely, “that's too hot, I'm turning off now.”

I waited for it to cool and turned it back on.

It said “fan error” and turned itself off.

I'm slowly putting together a running system, but normal service has been interrupted. IBM warranty repair should have my laptop fixed in a week or so.

Your patience is appreciated.