Laptop temps slowly rising up on idle

[haxc]

I have a pretty old laptop (IBM thinkpad t42 2373-cto) When it boots its cpu temp is about 35c (which is great!) and on idle (just sitting doing nothing but looking at the wallpaper) it slowly rises up to about 50-55c! I know I need to replace a 13 year old thermal paste but the screws on the bottom are stripped and i can't open the laptop. Any suggestions?

P.S. These temperatures are when I use tpfc and set to manual fan level 3 (3556 rpm) on bios settings it's worse

Laptop specs (in case you wanted to know)
Pentium m 1.6ghz
Ati mobility Radeon 7500 32mb
1.5 GB ram
55GB hdd
Windows xp
(Please don't tell me I should get a new one, I know I just want to fix this one because it's sufficient for what I do)

 

[johnb35]

Get a new one? lol JK

Have you tried using a can of compressed air to blow out the vents? Are you sure they are stripped and not just using the right size screwdriver? Some screws can be really tight.

 

[beers]

Most of them have pretty conservative fan profiles that don't really ramp up until the CPU is around that temperature.

You should be able to do the ole compressed air approach

 

[Espozo]

Are you sure they are stripped and not just using the right size screwdriver? Some screws can be really tight.

It would be nice if you'd take a picture of them, haxc. You still might be able to get them out even if they are stripped (at least not completely), but I imagine they're pretty small so I don't know.

 

[haxc]

It would be nice if you'd take a picture of them, haxc. You still might be able to get them out even if they are stripped (at least not completely), but I imagine they're pretty small so I don't know.

I tried but for some reason it looks even more stripped than it really is. In the online user guide (from lenovo's/ IBM's site) it says #0 phillips screw driver, and it didn't work

 

[Espozo]

Well, I've had some success with removing stripped screws by putting some super glue in the screw head, holding the screwdriver in it until it hardens, and then unscrewing it.