T41 screen suddenly goes blank - possible overheating?

Having an intermittant problem with my T41, and wondering if anyone has any idea as to the cause.
Most of the time, I use it in a docking station. Sometimes, after I've been using it for a while, the screen suddenly goes blank. There's still hard drive activity, as the light keeps on flashing, but the screen stays blank no matter what I do. The only way out is to do a hard reboot via the power button and, when I switch it back on again, the screen comes back, but usually some of the desktop icons have changed places. One time, the screen resolution had also been reduced to 800x600, and I had to reset it back to 1024x768.
I have noticed recently that, when it does this little screen shutdown trick, the fan doesn't seem to be operating and, if I remove the computer from the docking station, it does seem a bit warm underneath. Then, when I reboot the computer, the fan kicks in right away and seems to be pushing a lot of heat out of the vent in the side.
So does anyone know if this is an overheating issue caused by the fan not kicking in when it should, or could there be another cause? One thing that has me confused is that, according to the Windows fault reporting system, it says its a video driver fault and I should update the driver. So can anyone tell me just what the problem really is?
Edit:
I've been able to find one of the manuals as a PDF, and it seems like the computer is unexpectedly hibernating due to the CPU overheating. Unfortunately, that's all it says, and doesn't give any advice as to how to fix the problem. Does that sound like a correct diagnosis?
Solved!
Go to Solution.

Don't know why this topic has been marked as "solved" when it's still an ongoing problem - I certainly didn't mark it as such!
Installed the program you suggested, and ran a few tests. From those, it looks like the issue could be the CPU, not the GPU, that's been overheating and causing the hibernation. With the computer just idling, the CPU temperature reports about 35-38 degrees C, while the GPU sits around the 40-44 degrees C mark. Playing a HD flash video, the GPU temperature went up to around 50 degrees C, while the CPU went up to 69 degrees C. At that point, the fan hadn't kicked in, so I switched from Smart to Manual mode, at which point it started in Mode 7 and brought the CPU temperature back down.
I then ran the test again a few more times with different videos and, with Smart mode selected again, the fan did kick in automatically at around 66 degrees C on the CPU temperature, but only in Mode 1. This seem to just stabilise the temperature, not bring it down, and I had to go to Manual mode to get a higher fan speed.
Before I installed the fan control program, I don't think the fan was kicking in at all, as there was no sign of air coming out of the vent. The only time the fan did kick in was after the reboots, and then only for a minute or so. The program seems to show that both the CPU temperature sensor and the fan are working OK, but it appears that they aren't talking to each other properly. Any ideas why this could be?

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T41 screen suddenly goes blank - possible overheating?

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