Cleaning laptop fan
The cooling fan in one of my work laptops have been making a grinding sound for the past few weeks, but I have been putting off getting it checked because, well, I hate opening up compact electronic devices. Finally, the last two days it started to sound much, much worse, like the fan was going to die. I relented and gathered my tools for a minor operation.
The laptop in question is a 3-4 year old Lenovo Y510P. When I was shopping for a new laptop back then, I specifically asked the guy at the shop to recommend me a laptop that has good cooling, and he push this to me with the assurance "This is a gaming laptop, best cooling system!!". Guess what, this laptop easily has the worst cooling ever in all the laptops I have owned and currently own. So much so I had to install a third party script to keep the fan running in it's fastest mode whenever I'm working.
Anyway, on to the dismembering dismantling. The bottom cover is pretty straightforward:
- Eject the optical drive (the Y510P has a removable optical drive to accommodate a portable graphic card, because gaming laptop....psst, portable graphic card sold separately)
- Open N number of screws
- Pull the bottom cover open.
You can see the fan assembly on the upper right corner in the photo above. Peel open the paper-like cover to access the connector for the fan, then pull the connector out. Finally, remove 3 microscopic screws to open the fan assembly.
Observe the gunk and dirt in it's full glory.
The fan was dirty, the vent was clogged and the interior of the casing was covered in dirt particles. I actually wiped off a good amount of dirt from inside the casing before taking the picture, lest anyone think my laptop has been sucking in volcanic ash.
I used a small brush to scrape of the dust from the fan blades and the vents, then screw the fan assembly shut and switched on the laptop to see if the fan is still making any sound.
Yes, yes.... both my real desk top and my Windows desktop are equally messy.
After making sure the fan is working and not making any strange noises, I turned my attention to the bottom cover.
You can see there are three quadrilateral (read : squarish) shapes on the upper side of the cover. These are actually openings where the fan draws in cold air to cool the laptop innards. Covering the openings is a piece of mesh filter, which you probably guessed, was completely clogged as well.
Partially cleaned mesh filter. See the middle opening with a patch of clogged holes? All 3 openings looked like that before I cleaned them with tissue paper.
With that last step completed, I screws the bottom cover back and booted up the laptop.
Testing the CPU temperature, so far so good.
If you are a computer geek, you might've noticed I did not remove the whole cooling assembly to apply fresh thermal paste. That is because it involves dismantling almost the entire laptop into a thousand pieces, which I do not have the stomach for. If it ever comes to that I shall be sending it to a shop (or @denion, since he seems to be more handy with these stuffs than me and he accepts STEEM!)
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I clean and maintain my own computer but its a desktop pc, i've opened laptops before and they are a nightmare compared to desktops!
Yes opening laptops frighten me. One false move and oops you've bricked it!
Looks pretty complicated on my normal eyes. ^^ hope it was a success. ^^
So far so good!
That's great to hear. :)
I open laptop all the time! Haha! Urs is easy to open
For me...open is easy...put it back together is another story :o