Fixing An Overheating Laptop
Do you have a laptop that seems to be overheating as you use it? Specifically, are you using a Dell Inspiron 1100? I may have the solution to your problem.
You may have read an earlier post of how I was putting ice packs under my laptop to keep it cool enough so that I could work. This was a fine workaround at first. But the laptop began getting hotter quicker each time I used it. As of two days ago, I couldn’t get any work done at all.
Yesterday I took drastic measures and tore into my laptop. You can do the same by following these instructions here and here. Basically you will be taking the cooling module and the main computer chip out of your laptop. The idea is to replace the thermal grease that is between the chip and its heatsink. Unfortunately, the thermal paste on my chip had turned into superglue and I wasn’t able to separate the chip from its cooling unit. The good news is that I noticed some lint sticking out from the corner of one of the cooling fins. Since I was at work, I was able to use dry, compressed air to blow out all the lint and mess from the fan and cooling fins.
TA-DA! Here I am now, working on a very cool and very quiet running laptop. Before my little operation, my computer was running at 160°. Now it’s humming along at an efficient 120° and I’m not running into the slowdown problems that I was.
update – 20 Mar 2010 – after using this laptop for the past 8 years, it has finally reached that critical point. Do I pay $500 to replace the battery, hard drive and memory — all were contributing to temperature issues — or do I get a new laptop? So I bit the bullet and got an Acer Aspire 7736Z-4088. More adventures to continue….
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