Yes the title is a bad post easter pun.
alas,
As everyone knows, laptops can suck up a considerable amont of dust. What is less known is how truly adversely this can affect everything you do.
I hadn't cleaned my laptop in roughly a year, and it's a pretty dust-free environment around here realistically. I started getting random shut downs, overheats, throttling galore. Finally, my gpu was hitting 95C while attempting to play games at values nearing 250mhz core clock (and I usually play at 675mhz, and stock is 575!!!)
It shut down on me yesterday and I finally caved to its persistent requests of love and hygene.
My god.
For no pets, carpet, and a clean room for over a year, this thing built up dust. Not big clumps or anything, more of a layer of thin sand like dust that was in a lot of heatsink grooves. After cleaning it made me realize smth. Even though the heatsink mainly appeared clean, the method that fans use to blow out air is a bit inefficient seeing that a lot of air is blown through the grates in only one area. Meaning as soon as that area gets covered on the inside by insultating dust, not even blocked but just covered a little, there's serious heat transfer issues. And once it's blocked, well it just gets considerably worse.
Anyways, laptop is back to normal after that, just goes to show how dusting out the laptop really does help alot. I'm going to be adding another fan in here soon meaning more maintenance.
I personally like to blow with compressed air once everything is disassembled and poor straight up isopropyl alcohol into the heat sinks and through them for about 5-10 seconds. Then shake, blow, shake, heat, blow, shake, wait. and it's as good as new. Mainly cause I think it's not just the air resriction thats a problem but the thin layer of dust impeding thermal transfer thats inside the heatsinks themselves.
SO this is a reminder to everyone. DUST out your laptops!
Also I think April showers, spring cleaning and all that jazz should imply that, and we should have a national love your laptop day, let's say....ohhhhh april 6th? In order to appease the laptop gods.
Where we spend a few hours cleaning and caring in every fashion for that thing we so often take for granted until it breaks on our laps.
alas,
As everyone knows, laptops can suck up a considerable amont of dust. What is less known is how truly adversely this can affect everything you do.
I hadn't cleaned my laptop in roughly a year, and it's a pretty dust-free environment around here realistically. I started getting random shut downs, overheats, throttling galore. Finally, my gpu was hitting 95C while attempting to play games at values nearing 250mhz core clock (and I usually play at 675mhz, and stock is 575!!!)
It shut down on me yesterday and I finally caved to its persistent requests of love and hygene.
My god.
For no pets, carpet, and a clean room for over a year, this thing built up dust. Not big clumps or anything, more of a layer of thin sand like dust that was in a lot of heatsink grooves. After cleaning it made me realize smth. Even though the heatsink mainly appeared clean, the method that fans use to blow out air is a bit inefficient seeing that a lot of air is blown through the grates in only one area. Meaning as soon as that area gets covered on the inside by insultating dust, not even blocked but just covered a little, there's serious heat transfer issues. And once it's blocked, well it just gets considerably worse.
Anyways, laptop is back to normal after that, just goes to show how dusting out the laptop really does help alot. I'm going to be adding another fan in here soon meaning more maintenance.
I personally like to blow with compressed air once everything is disassembled and poor straight up isopropyl alcohol into the heat sinks and through them for about 5-10 seconds. Then shake, blow, shake, heat, blow, shake, wait. and it's as good as new. Mainly cause I think it's not just the air resriction thats a problem but the thin layer of dust impeding thermal transfer thats inside the heatsinks themselves.
SO this is a reminder to everyone. DUST out your laptops!
Also I think April showers, spring cleaning and all that jazz should imply that, and we should have a national love your laptop day, let's say....ohhhhh april 6th? In order to appease the laptop gods.
Where we spend a few hours cleaning and caring in every fashion for that thing we so often take for granted until it breaks on our laps.
I spent this past weekend dusting out 4 of my old comps. As mentioned above one must really takes the dings apart and not just blowing air and vacuum from outside 
