From day 1, my company provided IBM T60p has had the acoustical properties of a 747 at idle. The fan had two settings, loud and LOUDER… the fan never turns off. At first I didn’t care too much, but my wife has since appropriated my “good” laptop, a Dell E1705 (a.k.a. the Boat Anchor) forcing me to live with this noisy, dim screened beast day and night.

The fan noise complaint is a regularly posted problem on the Thinkpads Forum. Until recently there wasn’t a lot you could do. But if you read this thread specifically the last few pages you will find a link to: http://staff-www.uni-marburg.de/~schmitzr/tpfcserv_t60.zip

This will install a fan control service which tweaks some of the temperature settings, allowing the fan to run more often at the whining speed as opposed to howling speed.

Still just a small band-aid on pretty poorly designed cooling system. It’s really pathetic for such a spendy laptop.