Help understanding output of sensors command

Question

I have an Acer Travelmate 2420 running Ubuntu Jaunty. It's rather old and halts on occasion due to overheating:

Aug  9 22:25:56 Fjords kernel: [10921.525876] ACPI: Critical trip point
Aug  9 22:25:56 Fjords kernel: [10921.525892] Critical temperature reached (85 C), shutting down.
Aug  9 22:25:57 Fjords init: tty4 main process (2123) killed by TERM signal
Aug  9 22:25:57 Fjords init: tty5 main process (2124) killed by TERM signal
Aug  9 22:25:57 Fjords init: tty2 main process (2130) killed by TERM signal
Aug  9 22:25:57 Fjords init: tty3 main process (2132) killed by TERM signal
Aug  9 22:25:57 Fjords init: tty6 main process (2133) killed by TERM signal
Aug  9 22:25:57 Fjords init: tty1 main process (3254) killed by TERM signal
Aug  9 22:26:02 Fjords kernel: [10928.182135] Critical temperature reached (76 C), shutting down.
Aug  9 22:26:31 Fjords console-kit-daemon[2446]: WARNING: Couldn't read /proc/2445/environ: Failed to open file '/proc/2445/environ': No such file or directory

The sensors command shows me the same limits without telling me which component these are upper bounds for. I ran sensors-detect to check, but that tells me the machine has no or unsupported sensors.

So, how do I understand the below output ?

$ sudo sensors
acpitz-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
temp1:       +59.0°C  (crit = +85.0°C)    
temp2:       +51.0°C  (crit = +77.0°C)                  

Before I open up the laptop and smear thermal paste on the CPU, I'd like to know that will actually help.

Answer 1

The sensors command gives the same output on my Intel Core based laptop. Most likely the two sensors it's reading off of are for the CPU and GPU.

I'd be apprehensive about reapplying thermal paste on the older laptop. Most likely it's suffering from a ventilation problem to be overheating so frequently on both of its sensors. Cleaning dust out and making sure the fans are all working properly would be my concern.