Comments on: Fixing an Overheating Laptop

By: Raj

Raj — Sat, 19 Jan 2013 05:56:24 +0000

Note sure this helps – I followed the procedure using Arctic MX-4 and found temps reaching 95-98c while running x11perf -all on ubuntu.

BTW, strongly advise taking a picture of the brackets/wire setup before removing the heat sink – putting it all back together is difficult without a picture of the original layout!

By: West

West — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 20:55:08 +0000

Very bad Tutorial. You have to remove lots of cables and other stuff. Itstoo riskyfor me, I do not want to end up with a broken laptop.

By: John B

John B — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 09:37:38 +0000

WOW! Exactly what i needed!

By: Tomas

Tomas — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 14:06:57 +0000

Thank you very much!

Worked exactly as described. Temperature dropped from 70-90 to 40-50.

By: Alex W

Alex W — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 04:10:11 +0000

Thanks Jon!

I was definitely afraid of messing with this one. I use it every day, and I definitely wouldn’t have been happy if something went wrong. But as it turned out, I really needed the graphics card working to finish a school assignment. I was between a rock and a hard place. (Though it turned out not to have anything to do with the GPU… oh well.)

By: Jonathan Lamothe

Jonathan Lamothe — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 10:26:46 +0000

I’m always a little intimidated by taking laptops apart. They’re way harder to service than desktops (particularly my netbook). Great job.

By: Alex W

Alex W — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 19:48:59 +0000

@Chris I was playing games all night. In the name of science!

@Ben Thanks Ben! Good to know my intuition isn’t way off.

@Bob Thanks Bob! I was inspired to take some pictures after I couldn’t find a single set of instructions for disassembling a T400.

There wasn’t much dust inside. I had hit the vents pretty hard with some compressed air, but I didn’t see a whole lot of dust coming out when I did that, either. I wonder if the laptop had taken a bump, and shifted the position of the heat sink on the processor…

By: Bob Jonkman

Bob Jonkman — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 05:37:00 +0000

A beautiful series of disassembly photos.

Did you find any dust clogging the exhaust vents of the heat sink? Most laptops that I’ve disassembled have some dust that can be easily removed with a small brush once the case has been opened. On my own laptop there was so much dust that there was no air movement at all, and with no hot air coming out the vents it took a long time before I suspected heat problems.

–Bob.

By: Ben Brown

Ben Brown — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 23:42:58 +0000

Looks good! Yep, modern CPUs clock themselves down automatically when they start to overheat.

By: Chris Bruner

Chris Bruner — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 17:23:59 +0000

Nice blog post. And here I thought you were just playing games all night.