Hi folks,

I just came into an older but very lovable Gateway m-1625, which is a 15" media laptop running a TL60 Turion 64x2 cpu. I got it cheap because it was shutting down due to excess heat.

I began by restoring the installation to factory via the recovery partition. This helped because the HDD was so fragmented that all kinds of system filed had become corrupted and the drive was working overtime. The lappy runs Vista x86, which I then fully updated. I got rid of uncessary background programs to keep things light.

I flashed the bios to the latest version. It's a pretty dumbed-down bios, unfortunately.

The machine definitely began operating more coolly. The HDD temp went from 48C to 35 during defrag operations.

At this point I turned my attention to the hardware. I opened the case and blew out everything. I renewed the thermal paste on the cpu. A few more degrees came off the HDD that way.

But the CPU is still running hot. It's about 62C on idle, and has gone up to 72 while defragging. This is uncomfortable under the fingers.

I would love to drop the CPU temps another 7-10d if feasible. My question is how to do it:

How much of a role is buggy Vista playing in this? Would it help to upgrade to Win8? I've got Win8 on a 2GHz Intel Core Duo IBM laptop, and it handles well. It has about the weight of WinXP.

Would a 64 bit OS handle heat better than x86?

Would upgrading to a more powerful chip for the same S1g1 socket help the temp, or make it worse?

Is it possible for a cpu to go bad and begin to overheat? It's hard to imagine a new machine getting away with putting out this level of therms.

Is there such a thing as upgrading the fan?

I don't know what else to do. The fan is doing its best to get the hot air out of there, but it's not enough. I had the thought of soldering extension fins onto the heatsink. But that gets rid of existing heat, it doesn't lessen the amount of heat being produced.

Any insight would be much appreciated.

Be blessed.

Not much, Vista SP2 works fairly well.

IMO, no.

IMO, no.


I do not think it would help the temp.

It is possible but more likely the motherboard goes bad over time, also the GPU puts out a lot of heat.

For laptops that is not very common, not easy to find a matching and better fan.


Would open the laptop again making sure nothing blocking both the inflow and outflow of air. Then redo the thermal paste, clean off any old paste then apply a very tiny amount of paste. Making sure the heat sink fins are clean and make sure a solid contact with the processor core is applied.

If you can access the GPU heatsink and if it is removable, then redo the thermal paste on it also.

What do you use for monitoring CPU temp? Tried CoreTemp?

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Much thanks for your input. I think I would lean toward upgrading to Win8 based on what I've seen on the other laptop. It seems to handle memory a lot better than Win7 or even XP.

I think the GPU is responsible for much if not most of the problem here. I don't know what I can do about it. The heatsink veers over to what I think is the GPU - two cubic blocks standing up. But I'm not sure that is it. I don't get a GPU temp reading from my monitoring utility.

I've ordered a replacement for the fan. I heard rumbling from it at low sppeds last night. It has been doing a lot of heavy lifting and I think it's worn out.

I blew the machine out with a compressor, so it's definitely clean. And I repasted the CPU/heatsink.