Hi Greg,
Greg Farough <[email protected]> writes:
On Thu, Jul 31 2025, MGD <[email protected]> wrote:
Dear Guix Community,
I hope this message finds you well. I'm currently setting up
Guix on
my Lenovo X220 laptop and would greatly appreciate any guidance
or
tips for optimizing performance on older hardware.
In my experience, the difficult part is the guix pull. Older
machines
like my X200 can only barely (and only sometimes) manage it
without
overheating.
These older machines will certainly get hot, but shoudn’t
*overheat*, even under heavy load. By "overheat," I mean going
into thermal shutdown, which will immediately power off the
machine, or sometimes restart it. Simply getting hot, even very
hot, is normal. As long as it’s still running, it’s not
overheating.
If yours is entering thermal shutdown, your thermal paste is
likely old and worn out. Thermal paste transfers heat from the
CPU to the heatsink/fan ("fansink") assembly, and over the years,
it dries out and stops working effectively. No matter how fast
the fan runs, it won’t cool the system unless the heat moves from
the CPU to the heatsink, and it’s the thermal paste which makes
that happen. I can reccommend Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut, which is
better than the stuff from the factory, but even a less expensive
paste is likely an improvement over the very old stuff you
probably have now. I recommend avoiding Liquid Metal and other
pastes that conduct electricity, because it gets anywhere other
than exactly where it should be, it can bridge traces on the
motherboard.
Every ThinkPad has a Hardware Maintrnance Manual which documents
this procedure, which usually only takes a few minutes.
-- Ian
