An interesting post this, and perhaps a warning to those thinking about buying certain brands of laptop...
Roll back a few weeks and an "old" laptop from work was to be thrown out. This old laptop is an i7 with 8Gb of RAM and dedicated Ati On-board card. Basically a beast.
Why is it being thrown out? It keeps shutting down and has all sorts of issues, and it feels "cook an egg (tm)" hot to use.
No matter, I'm not going to use it for work, I'll just use it for occasional stuff and it'll be fine...
Move on to last week, I had a replay (the post below) and I wanted to upload it - this is the ideal machine for that. Easily the fastest in the house and I can sit in front of the TV whilst all the slow upload stuff happens. Nice.
And that's where the trouble started - a mere copy of a 10min 720p file caused the laptop to overheat and go into standby. Wowzers (if that's a word).
A bit of downloading later and CPUID HW Monitor was telling me that once the chassis hit 100.c it would shutdown. That's a lot of laptop heat - certainly the fan action and general heat in this thing spelled heat induced badness, the smell of heat in electrics isn't a good thing mmmkay.
Reading around it seems the whole heat to fan setup is a dust filter. So one can of compressed air later and I gave it another go. This time I at least managed to copy the file. As soon as processing started though, end of game. Bad laptop.
I had a solution. The solution happened to be a high pressure air gun out in the garage. Blow that mo-fo.
Nope. Still overheating.
I started to wonder if this was a designed in feature of i7 laptops. A bit of "slow down bro, take a chill pill..." Certainly only using this laptop in the fridge seemed to be the best option.
Then I read an article about poor thermal paste (the bit between the processor and the heat sink). And given this laptop's price (Nothing) I thought I'd give it a go.
The basic principle of pulling laptops apart is to undo all the screws you can find. Then peel off any important looking stickers and undo the screws found there. Many, many screws later and I had the laptop apart, and then the fun began.
Firstly the four screws holding the heat sink on were at best loose. I'd say never done up to be honest.
Then there's this:
Shame on you whoever put this thermal paste on. Though kudos for use of a doughnut dough dispenser in micro electronics. Yes, a solid mm of paste on only half the chip. Wrong whatever way you look at it.
So I cleaned that off and put some new paste on, across the chip, and at a suitable skim of thinness.
It's probably not perfect, but it's better than the tech dump that was taken on there before...
And the results? A cooler laptop by some margin.
Below shows the restart from hibernate - the max temps are pre-'fix'. The live figs show pretty much how things are now when busy processing (resting is as it was, down around 46.c), certainly the laptop didn't even manage to get this far through the save movie process before.
And - should you attempt this on your laptop? If it's worth nothing to you then probably. If you gave a kidney to have a fancy laptop you never actually use on your laptop then probably not.
And whilst I've done a few of these in the past, I certainly don't enjoy it - laptops aren't really for pulling apart, it's not so much butter fingers as butter component clips.
Finally, thanks HP, you gave me a free laptop, in a round about way.
