To All Laptop Owners

[German_EE]

If like me you find that your laptop is suffering a little during the current warm weather (I hit 90 C whilst watching a YouTube video) there is a solution.

1) Dismantle the laptop and clean out all the dust and cat hair. A clean paintbrush helps here.

2) Remove the heatsink(s) and using some alcohol clean off the old crusty heatsink compound. Do the same with the CPU, the graphics chip and any other devices that were attached. You can also clean out all of the hair and dust from the heatsink.

3) Put new heatsink compound on the two or three chips then refit the heatsink

4) TEST YOUR WORK before you put the notebook back together. Most BIOS programs have a way to monitor the CPU temperature in real time and if you see anything over 50C then you've done something wrong and you should shut down and check your work.

5) Reassemble your laptop and enjoy some cool computing. In my case the idle temperature dropped from 48C to 32C and I now see 50C when watching EEVBlog. The heatsink compound they use isn't much good and after eight years it just wasn't working.

DISCLAIMER******************************************
Laptop computers are delicate little creatures and if you don't feel
comfortable doing this then head for a PC repair shop and let them
do the work. If you break it then it's not my fault.
****************************************************

[Rasz]

6) turn it on and realize there is no backlight because you are not a computer technician and screwed something in the process
I fixed about 5 laptops that came to me with this exact story 

[wraper]

Or replace all of these measures with blowing compressed air into cooling exhaust holes. Result will be the same.

[Kjelt]

Or replace all of these measures with blowing compressed air into cooling exhaust holes. Result will be the same.

No then you will blow the dust in the machine. Best is to get access from inside to the cpu cooler and there blow the compressed air so it goes out. Best to do this outside *cough*
Often you can gain access to the cpu by opening some of the panels on the back. or flipping the keyboard out.

[hamdi.tn]

6- count screw you forgot to put back it place 

[paulhm81]

If the cpu end of the heatpipe is hot and the fan side is cold, then your heatpipe bled the water inside and you need to replace it!

[wraper]

Or replace all of these measures with blowing compressed air into cooling exhaust holes. Result will be the same.

No then you will blow the dust in the machine. Best is to get access from inside to the cpu cooler and there blow the compressed air so it goes out. Best to do this outside *cough*
Often you can gain access to the cpu by opening some of the panels on the back. or flipping the keyboard out.

Best to blow from the outside. As heatsink gets clogged from the inside, it will be pretty hard to push all of the dirt through the heatsink plates as they are very narrow. If just blowing from outside, you can get some dust over inside of the notebook and not back through the ventilation holes but usually it is not a big issue unless you have collected 5+ year worth of dust in the heatsink.

[wraper]

6- count screw you forgot to put back it place 

Or look for the bumps on the enclosure because of screwing long screws in the wrong places.
Broken plastic clips, torn flex cables, broken connectors...
Actually I've yet to see a notebook disassembled by someone for cleaning and reassembled back in the same condition.

[T3sl4co1l]

Note that the BIOS may regulate to a given temperature -- this will tend to hide your cleaning process.  To find out for sure, you need to stress the GPU and CPU with a reasonably strenuous task.

If you see the temperature climbing over the setpoint, you know you need to fix something (clean the fan, do the goop better, replace a heat pipe, etc.).

My laptop normally sits around 60C, varying between 50C or below when idle and up to 70C when fully cranking on a warm day.  I've seen it go over 80C before (it shuts down if the GPU goes over 100C ), which required replacing the heatsink assembly (bad heat pipe).

SpeedFan is recommended for monitoring temperatures, fans, etc.

Tim

[Mr.B]

SpeedFan is recommended for monitoring temperatures, fans, etc.

+1
Also, use Prime95 to stress CPU.

[free_electron]

ditch the laptop and use computers that are built in full tower enclosures with big fans in em.  see what i did there ?

[T3sl4co1l]

see what i did there ?

'Fraid not, couldn't hear you over that cyclone in the background...

Tim

[Whales]

My second last laptop was in the "desktop replacement" category.  Heavy, < 2 hours battery life, overheat easily.

After several overheating issues I discovered that the fan-grill pattern on the plastic case was just decorative and had no holes.  It was placed directly on the side face of a blower fan and drilling some messy holes into it fixed all my overheating problems.

[GreyWoolfe]

6- count screw you forgot to put back it place 

Or look for the bumps on the enclosure because of screwing long screws in the wrong places.
Broken plastic clips, torn flex cables, broken connectors...
Actually I've yet to see a notebook disassembled by someone for cleaning and reassembled back in the same condition.

When I first started fixing laptops, I was working on one with the customer sitting right there (Dell in home warranty).  I had 1 screw left over that he could see.  Had to disassemble again to find where it went.  After that, I developed a method of organizing my  disassembly so I never again had left over screws or put the wrong screws in the wrong places.  Ultimately serviced over a 1,000 laptops with that company without issues.  In fact, there were a couple of times I had to piss out the flames that other techs caused.  Just goes to show that when you take care of the little details, the big details take care of themselves.  Now, when I work on a laptop for someone or company equipment here at the workbench, I organize the screws using an 18 count egg tray-free parts organizers after a number of breakfasts, especially over easy with habanero hot sauce and smoked sausage-yum.   

[poot36]

I think the worst overheated laptop that I have seen was a Toshiba Satellite Core 2 Duo with a removable dedicated graphics card that the northbridge got so hot that it started to melt the plastic sticker on the removable modem an inch or so away from the northbridge!  Needless to say the dust in the machine was black and almost sooty like.  The video card was also glitching out as well and the lcd hinge mounting points were mostly broken off and even the part of the metal hinge mount was broken (0.5 cm square or so of metal cracked in half!).  I suspect that the laptop had been dropped because there were other screws that were not going back in again due to broken mount points.  Amazingly the hard drive and lcd were fine.

[wraper]

Some laptops have thermal pads and when you clean it off you will find a gap between HS and CPU/GPU - you can buy copper shims off ebay to fix this.

If you need to replace thermal pad, buy thermal pad. Be sure to buy one with right type. Those which are like rubber are the worst ones. Copper shims are for scam GPU "repairs" (heating GPU, applying copper shim. Will last few weeks-months at best).

[Jeroen3]

Also remember that laptop heatpipes often fail to function if the base is vertical.
_{In other words: you're putting the screen flat on the table.}

[Psi]

hm.. this long screw seems to be getting really tight all of a sudden. Better get a bigger screwdriver and put some force into it.

[Rasz]

fan-grill pattern on the plastic case was just decorative and had no holes.

still better than apple, they have neither real nor decorative holes for cooling, it would disturb aesthetics!