Monday, July 4, 2011

Laptop Thermal Compound Replaced

Lauren, my primary laptop (HP tx2), had been overheating, burning my lap, and shutting down unexpectedly. Upon installing Speccy (same people as Ccleaner), I found out that she was running in the high 90 degrees Celsius. Considering that my AMD processor is rated for under the boiling point of water, I knew something needed to change. Task manager showed usual idling CPU usage, so I couldn't blame the heat on any one program. Lauren was just getting old and dusty. I also expected that she had poor quality thermal compound on her processor.

My best friend, neighbor, and fellow computer expert, Lukas, had a partly used tube of Arctic Silver 5 that he was willing to give me. Today, I took the time to disassemble Lauren, clean the heatsink, and replace the (dry and crappy) old thermal compound. After a scare with the screen's cable not being properly in, she is back up and running and COLD!!! Well, cold in comparison. (66*C with a few tabs open in Chrome)

For those of you wishing to do as I did, Arcticsilver.com has good instructions.

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