11.16.2009

Laptop Surgery

I love poking around inside my laptop. It makes me feel super hardcore/techy/hackerish, which is great because none of those adjectives really apply.
Anyways, my poor Dell Inspiron M1530's had it rough lately. Overheating, randomly shutting down, making dull roaring noises, stuff like that. From a goddessandguru standpoint, that translates into needless power drainage -- an unspeakable crime, obvi. (Note: the word "obvi" is used here to show, in an amusing way, how totally unqualified the author is to be writing a post like this.)
One cause of overheating in a laptop is the accumulation of dust, especially on the fan. Even though I know next to nothing about computers, I attempted a dissection in the name of science/goddessandguru/the greater good. Here we go...

Before you begin, protect your laptop from damaging static electricity by grounding yourself. Basically, touch a piece of metal.

Now. I found a screwdriver and got to work.

Oh dang, laptop innards. Time to zoom in a bit.

As I suspected, the fan was kind of dirty and nasty. The pictures are awful, I know.

A q-tip wasn't the ideal tool for this procedure...I think you're supposed to use compressed air or something...but for the laygoddess, it sufficed.

Ah, much shinier. Pictures of dust:

My laptop has been much cooler and quieter since the operation, and it's been running smoothly. Which is surprising, seeing as I assumed it would either blow up in my face or start processing everything in Cyrillic after I had my way with it. Score.

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