I have a friend whose laptop is having problems overheating and just shutting itself off. I'm thinking since the laptop is kinda old that it might be worth it to take the heatsink off the CPU, give them both a good cleaning and apply some fresh thermal compound. Is there any reason that I shouldn't do this or isn't recommended? Anybody have any other ideas to fix the problem? I've already cleaned the inside of the laptop out for dust. It's probably a poor airflow design anyways.
When I apply the thermal grease is it better to put a little dab in the middle and let the heatsink spread it out when I attach it or to spread it around over the CPU before attaching the heatsink? Various internet sources say one way or the other but I haven't seen which way is better. (I've only had to do this once before when I built my desktop a couple years ago and a friend was helping me with it)
I used to have a tube of Arctic Silver. I would put a dab on and put a thin layer of compound all over the heat sink. Didn't want to miss a spot.
Is the fan actually running?
Let me know if this works, I have a friend who's laptop is doing the same thing. When it happened to mine, there was a cat sized hairball on my heat sink.
The fan is running ok. Under normal conditions the laptop does all right (just browsing the net, working in Word, etc.) but when I tried a CPU intensive Norton Virus Scan the temps jumped from 60C to 80C and after a couple minutes it'd just down. I tried it with it sitting on my bed with little air flow and on a hard surface with no difference between the two.
Oh....I should mention that the laptop really hasn't been used in a year or more because of the shutting down issues, but I know the problem wasn't there from the beginning. I also found two loose screws inside that attach the fan to the heatsink and I put those back in, but I've no way to tell if something got jarred loose after those screws fell out (for some unknown reason).
On Laptop CPUs I apply the teeniest amount of Arctic silver directly to the CPU core. Then I use something flat, like a razor blade, knife, or a small plastic spreading ker-jigger to put a thin layer of compound on top of the core, then I put the heatsink down. With materials like Arctic Silver 5 there is a risk of that thermal compound conducting electricity (back in the Athlon T-bird days it was often used to unlock multipliers on CPUs) so you definitely don't want any more than is absolutely neccessary.
Thanks for all the advice. I took the heatsink off and discovered there wasn't any kind of thermal compound... no grease, no pad, no nothing. It was just the heatsink directly on the CPU core. I put a really thin layer of grease on there, and after putting everything back together the laptop is idling at a much more respectable 52-57. I'm running a virus scan again and it's spiking up to 67 every now and then but it's staying around 62ish degrees, instead of the 75-80 it was before the thermal grease.
