Techie Fairy

And here it is, all reassembled and able to breathe. From an initial reported borderline terminal 77°C, to a much healthier 34°C. Now onto the malware scans and optimisation.

... and put fresh thermal paste on the processor and heatsink, and put it back together. Look how nice and clean it looks now!

So I cleaned Tiddles' fluff out...

... and this. Cats make excellent insulation 😸

... and this...

So, today's patient is a rather smart Lenovo All-in-One touchscreen PC. I was called to an email problem, and noticed that the fan sounded like it was going to take off any moment and that every keypress and mouse click.... took.... an..... eternity.... to respond. The owner gave me the OK to bring it back to base for a service, so I took the back off and found this...

And here we are. One replacement bottom cover later, with CPU and heatsink cleaned and repasted, and it's dropped from 78°C to 32°C. Another good machine saved from the tip for a third of the cost of a new one. Just the factory reset left to do. I find jobs like this very satisfying. I'm a big believer in saving electronics from landfill wherever possible.

And then to add insult to injury, as if bits of plastic floating around in the fan wasn't enough, we have the standard fur coat! But despite these little bits breaking off, it is a testament to the build quality of Acers that this hadn't already melted! I do like my Acers.

It also doesn't do the screen any good to have one hinge not properly anchored like this. This is one reason why they crack.

And sure enough there's all the bits of loose plastic. If you look through my other boards you'll see I've had 2 or 3 Acer Aspires from this family that this has happened to. Always in the same corner as the fan and the DC socket, which is why it can cause such big problems. The bits of plastic can start whirring round in the fan blades, either damaging them or stopping them going round all together. The result? One slow-cooked laptop.

Well would you look at that. A floating hinge!

A closer inspection revealed this... And I was pretty certain that once I took the top off, I'd find several screws floating free and some broken plastic moulding that should be holding them in.

This laptop originally came in for a factory reset. So I plugged in the charger, lifted the screen, and watched as the top left corner of the cover came up with it...

So, having cleaned out all the fluff, and reapplied fresh thermal paste, here it is, with a lovely quiet fan and a perfectly acceptable running temperature. Tada!

Do we think that's possibly just a tiny bit dusty? Just a wee bit? 😱

Usually when you used compressed air on a laptop fan, all the dust comes shooting out and the fan blades whizz round quite happily. But this didn't happen so I became a little bit suspicious. It's not often you actually have to disassemble the entire fan but in this case....

And the thermal paste on the processor is also bone-dry, meaning that the heat can't be properly conducted away down the big copper heatsink, and this is when it really becomes a problem. The customer hasn't mentioned that the laptop has been shutting down spontaneously, so we've probably caught it in time.

... and here! Where they're not so lovely, as they're stopping all the lovely cool air from cooling the laptop.

... and here...

... and here...

And sure enough, lots of lovely little dust bunnies. Here...

And the first thing we find when we take the trap door off is a collection of fluff around the edges of the grille. I expect I'm going to find a lot more, clogging up the fan.

Here is today's patient. A lovely candy red HP Pavilion with a very noisy fan.