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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Glad to hear you fixed the problem – overheating can seriosly damage your computer if left too long. I’m pretty confident tearing apart my computer but when it comes to a laptop, I have heard that it can be very different… since everything is so small and harder to work with. It is a good thing that the lint that was stuck in there didn’t ignite (whoa, that could be bad)!
Hola Perros! As long as you take standard precautions such as wearing a static wrist strap, taking your time, and not forcing anything apart or together, you should have no problems.
You made a great observation about the lint igniting. I wonder if some of the laptop fires could be linked to fuzz trapped around the heatsink of the CPU?
Anyway, it has been five days now and my system is running very cool. Unfortunately, it still has a slowness problem but that is related to the nature of the Dell Inspiron 1100. No fix for that.
Glad to hear you fixed the problem – overheating can seriosly damage your computer if left too long. I’m pretty confident tearing apart my computer but when it comes to a laptop, I have heard that it can be very different… since everything is so small and harder to work with. It is a good thing that the lint that was stuck in there didn’t ignite (whoa, that could be bad)!
Hola Perros! As long as you take standard precautions such as wearing a static wrist strap, taking your time, and not forcing anything apart or together, you should have no problems.
You made a great observation about the lint igniting. I wonder if some of the laptop fires could be linked to fuzz trapped around the heatsink of the CPU?
Anyway, it has been five days now and my system is running very cool. Unfortunately, it still has a slowness problem but that is related to the nature of the Dell Inspiron 1100. No fix for that.
I also learn that Rechargeable dell batteries undergo self-discharging when left unused. Always store a inspiron battery pack in a fully charged staged for storage. so you need full charged before go hoilday, so will keep you new dell battery in 100% condition
Dell inspiron 1100 laptop can’t meet needs now, and the old dell inspiron 1100 battery ( http://www.batterygoshop.co.uk/dell/inspiron-1100-series-battery.htm) can only last 3 hours.
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You are a very smart person!
There are a lot of people who do not pay any attention to RAM when they buy their laptops. They may be ignorant or perhaps plain negligent on this. But when the laptop works slowly or perhaps conks off in the middle of important tasks, they wonder as to what happened suddenly.
Installing a fan to solve the problem
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