My wife's W510 randomly shuts down. A few months ago I sent it to Easyserve for this reason and they replaced the motherboard, but we still have the problem. I believe it is cooling related. Can anyone offer some advice on how to adjust the power settings for coolest operation?

In Windows 7 and the BIOS, the power settings are pretty limited, just "active" or "passive" (you want active) unless you also want to do something extreme like not run the CPU at more than a fraction of its speed. I've been using TPFanControl to boost the fan speed instead.

My W520 shut down while rendering H.264 video for a couple hours during our mini-heatwave this week on the east coast USA. The reported temperature climbed to 97C (ambient air was 80F) despite my efforts to keep the fan speed at max. I had customized the TPFanControl ini file to use higher fan speeds and not relinquish control to the BIOS until it hits 95C; Tmax is 100C on the i7-2820QM.

After this happened, I spent an hour or so disassembling the machine, removing the cooling unit, and replacing the goop Lenovo uses (always too much, it seems to me) with some carefully applied Artic Silver 5. The air temp had gone down a couple degrees F during this process, so the comparison isn't perfect but when I restarted the renders, the max fan speed was able to hold the die temperature to 90C +/- 1.

I mentioned in another post that SpeedFan can give better temperature information. It also offers graphs which could really help you determine whether your wife's W510 problem is in fact temperature related.

If she's not pushing the computer too hard and the environment isn't particularly hot, the computer shouldn't be getting hot enough to shut down. Unless you've got dust bunnies in your cooling fins or they really botched the thermal paste when they reassembled the machine.

I think your first step needs to be to confirm that the problem is cooling.

David,

Big thanks for the detailed supply. I am not enough technically capable to either disassemble the W510 or modify the bios. Heat was just a guess on my part because of the nature of the way is shuts down (one minute its on, then instant off). Ambient air temp and/or pushing the machine is not an issue. since Lenovo said they replaced the mother board that shouldn't be either. I hate to be a quitter, but we may just live with it. My W520 has never had a problem.

Drew