This is just my personal opinion based on my own direct experience, I’m sure someone could potentially prove me wrong, but here goes:

Cooling pads are snake oil. If your machine is too hot and it’s been in use for a year or two, you need to replace the thermal grease / compound between your CPU/GPU and the heat pipes that transfer heat to your fans. Assuming none of your fans are broken, the thermal compound is the culprit.

This sounds like a difficult task. It’s not. The necessary tools and materials cost about the same as a cooling pad. Generic instructions on YouTube (search “laptop repaste”) should give you a close enough demonstration to perform it on your own machine, but there are likely instructions out there for your specific model.

It’s as simple as: open the laptop case. Unplug the battery connector. Locate the center plate of your heat pipe assembly which will have multiple numbered screws. Unscrew them and lift the heat pipe assembly, exposing your CPU and GPU, which will be two mirror finished metallic surfaces. Clean the old grease off with lint free cloth and 91% isopropyl. Apply a small amount of your new grease (I use arctic mx-5) enough so that when smushed down it will cover the whole chip, but not so much it’ll squirt out the sides. Replace heat pipes and screw down the screws in the order of their numbers, just snug them, don’t go nuts with torque.

My gaming laptop was hitting thermal max of 99C. I did this and it rarely gets above 80C, which is pretty normal for gaming or other high loads. If the air coming out feels warm, that’s a good thing. Before doing any of this use a temperature utility like real temp on windows or btop on Linux to get an idea of how hot it gets. If it’s under 90 on your heaviest use case, don’t even bother.

I’m not sure I understand, but you do not want to blow air into the vent. That’s where the heat is coming out. Restricting that airflow will only make things hotter.

I’m not a thinkpad user - this just came up in my feed and someone else might have more specific advice - but generically I’d say to find the hottest spot on the bottom of the laptop and try to find something with a fan near that. That will probably be where your gpu or cpu is located. In addition, just generally using an overheating laptop on a hard surface is a good idea because it permits more airflow, even if you do not have a fan.

personal experience but they do work to an extent. its never bad to add more space at the bottom of the laptop as this is where the fans draw cool air in. but if the air in the room isnt much cooler, or as another pointed out if the thermal paste needs replacing it will have a minimal effect.

Have heard good thing about the IETS coolers, had one for my wife's old laptop, and it worked pretty good!

Don't spend any real money on a cooler, especially on a machine like an L440. I got 90% the benefit from just lifting up the laptop 1cm. A cheaper cooler got me maybe 5% more, and the even fancier cooler I bought got maybe 5% better than the shitter one. And that's on a P1 Gen 4 with an i9 and RTX 3080 where half the bottom of the laptop is a vent. My T14 gen 1 saw the same benefit from lifting it, but almost none from the active cooling pads.

Honestly the biggest benefit to the cooling pads is that the rest of the chassis is cooler so my wrist doesn't get quite as sweaty. That part is nice

But what was the biggest difference was swapping the old thermal paste for the Honeywell PTM 7950 phase change thermal "pad". Since my CPU runs so hot all the time the thermal paste dried out/heat pumped out in about 6 months, and by 9 months I was getting almost half the performance.

Also double check your power limits. In windows 10/11 the power plan you select actually controls the PL1 (long term) and PL2 (short term) of the CPU, and the max fan speed. Better battery limits me to 15 watts PL1 and 45 watts PL2. Balanced is 55 PL1 and 109 PL2, and best performance is 109 PL1 and PL2 and higher fan speeds. Haswell was right when power consumption started to get crazy, but hadn't reached full insanity like it is now.