What I learned upgrading my friend's TM8204.

I was asked to put Core 2 Duo into TM8204. Fun stuff.

Updated BIOS to 3319.

Opened back panel, unscrewed and removed heatpipe assembly. Discovered that contact of components with heatpipe is made through some sticky foamy material instead of thermal paste. Ha! Arctic silver time.

Put new processor in, applied arctic silver paste to CPU sink and ATI chip sink. Put everything back together.

Reboot. Check temps. Whoa, CPU is 37 degrees. That's cool!

Then problems started.

- Fan always on. Edit: on full, while blowing out cool air (since CPU is not hot, and ATI chip does not transfer heat to heatpipe). I remember someone reported experiencing this on the forums.
- Spontaneous reboots.
- Unexpected bootup after shutdown.
- etc.

Well, long story short, heatpipe was not touching ATI chip - needed thicker material there. Put the original stuff on ATI chip sink and assembled together. No more problems!

So, for those with the issues listed above: if you opened up laptop and replaced CPU and/or put thermal paste, check that ATI chip has thermal contact with sink/heatpipe.

Edit: This tells me that there are two thermal sensors - one near CPU and one near ATI chip - and fan is controlled either solely by ATI chip thermal sensor or by averaging temperature of both sensors. That's why when ATI chip is not cooled properly the fan is on full constantly. It allso means that ATI chip contributes the most heat in the system.

And another bit of experience. Restoring original system after converting C: and D: to NTFS. If you made restore DVD when prompted.

- Put any bootable XP CD, boot from it.
- Go through screens telling it that you want to install, not repair, not recover, reinstall.
- Get to the partition selection screen. Select C: to install XP to.
- Go further until it asks if you want to format it or leave intact. Choose format to FAT (Quick).
- Let it format. Interrupt setup.
- Put restore DVD in. Go through restore process. It'll overwrite C:, won't touch D:, and since C: is now FAT there will be no problem.

Perhaps will work even with restore from hidden partition that way. The trick is let XP setup reformat C: partition to FAT without touching D:

There it is. Have fun, everybody.

You have to understand that it's combined heat of CPU, video chip, and south bridge (USB, audio, ATA and SATA) results in that temperature reading because in Acer laptops all these components share the same heatpipe (cooling assembly). It also depends on processor type and whether you undervolted it. And ambient/room temperature is a factor too.

My TM8104 typically shows between 48 and 51 degrees under regular load and may go up to 74 during gaming. HD is 37 to 42 depending on how actively it is accessed.

52-54 is what my friend's TM8204 shows after I installed T7200 (Core 2 Duo 2GHz) for him. It definitely ran cooler before that - close to what I have in TM8104. Both undervolted. Don't know anything else about TM8204, will have to ask or check out.