So, I'm the happy owner of a Lenovo X201. It's a great notebook, very sturdy, amazing keyboard, and is fairly modern (first generation i5 processor). I'm very happy with it, especially after I upgraded to 8GB of RAM, and I replaced my old 7200 RPM HDD with a Kingston SSD, 120GB. Quite fast, these SSD's, worth the money, especially because my SSD was a gift.

I was thinking a while ago to make my computer noise-free, and to make the battery last longer: I wanted to get rid of the fan, as I saw in MacBook Air, and Asus ultrabooks. I thought that adding a sufficient amount of copper would do the job, but I was wrong. This experiment was a failure, and I want to share my experiences.

On MBA and Asus ultrabooks, this technique works for 2 reasons: a more recent processor, underclocked, so very cool, and a huuuge heatsink: the whole bottom of the notebook is used as a heatsink, in both of them being made from aluminum.

My processor is a 35W one: that's not that much, for a 60-80W one you need a cooler of about a kilogram, such that it will dissipate and absorb enough heat so it won't damage the chip: mine should have worked with about half that quantity, maybe even 300-350g would do: but that's quite an amount of copper there, and there's no place to put such a huge amount of metal inside of x201 case: plus, you have to make those fins somehow. I started by flattening a copper wire, that I got from an old electricity metter and I burned the insulation off them. Those 3 wires had about 50g (clearly not enough). I removed the fan, and I wanted to build those fins out of flattened wires, and this is where my DIY project died: you can't have good contact with the heatsink by soldering it, it's called a heatSINK, you need a huge ass soldering iron to melt the solder properly: I recommend getting at least a 120W one, if you want to pick up from where I failed. Also, I cut the PCIExpress card slot, I though that by getting some wires there, I could dissipate some heat of the north bridge (the chip next to the CPU), but is quite hard to do that. Chipping a bit of plastic from the bottom of the case could have made the space needed, but that will weaken a bit the laptop.

So, I decided to get back to the initial state: having a fan in my computer: be sure to have some desoldering wick at hand, It's very hard to clean the solder off the heatsink. I finally got back my fan, I soldered the PCIExpress slot back (I cut it with some pliers, I needed one of the nuts).

But I reduced the noise after all: I turned off HyperThreading on my CPU (from bios). HyperThreading allows a bit more efficient use of the cores, but at the cost of more heat == more aggressively spinning fan. Disable it, you won't even notice the performance penalties.

Also, I calibrated powertop on my system, and guess what: the biggest power drainer was the wifi card, not even the backlight, or the fan. The wifi chip draws about 9W of power, while the fan about 3-4W (previously it was 10W which apparently wasn't true). Here is how you do the calibration, and how you restore the optimum power saving configuration when rebooting: Powertop

Have a good day, and always have a backup plan when breaking your computer.