It would be very helpful to add a video tutorial about how to change the thermal paste. To ease the hard way of...

@ Brian Piltin "On battery they seem to be relatively quiet..." If so, an adaption of the energy profile by setting it to "balanced" or "battery optimized" (turning Turboboost off), see also in the BIOS, should harmonize the problem. Of course also all drivers and Windows update components should work optimal to enable the best possible performance flow - as well the entire Windows 7 program size should be as small as possible (=most tiny OS). By the way are you aware of this tool from Thinkpad enthusiasts? http://thinkwiki.de/TPFanControl Thanks, Daniel