Cleaning does make a difference :)

[arthurleung]

I found out my laptop was getting insanely hot and idling at 65'C and peak at 95'C.

Not sure what happened so I pulled off the laptop cover and found the fan covered with a bit of dust. cleaned it and I get 63'C idle and 92'C peak.

Then this time I took the whole fan (which is roughly 4cm diameter) off and guess what?
I found 2mm of dust blocking the 4cm wide copper heatsink module!

No wonder the temperature goes up so quickly under load and come down so slowly when I idle

Now my laptop idles at 45'C and full load at 63'C.

So, the purpose of this post is to remind everyone to clean their laptop heatsink every half year not to end up with a laptop that wouldn't run at full speed (Thermal throttling), or even worse, fried your laptop.

It is only a 5 minute job on a laptop unlike a desktop

CPU Spec: Core2Duo T7200 (on a crappy no-name laptop); 2Ghz @ 0.987V; 1Ghz @ 0.950V

[dogie]

Seems a bit strange that the achitecture can only slice off 0.037V for a halving in clock speeds. And on a side note your at the same College as my brother

[arthurleung]

Seems a bit strange that the achitecture can only slice off 0.037V for a halving in clock speeds. And on a side note your at the same College as my brother

The stock voltage is meant to be 1.187V (Each CPU got a different one I believe, same as Conroe)
I believe my CPU could go lower than 0.95 at idle (which would save a lot of battery if possible), but 0.95 is the lowest VID possible on non-ULV processors :S

[Zak33]

I think that's quite good advice

[acrobat]

me too

[Pob255]

The only problem with that is getting at the fan can often mean haveing to take the whole thing apart and removeing the heat sink assembly just to get at the fan.

Although I did give my old compaq a good blow and hooked out a couple of balls of fluf with a bent paper clip the other day, I think it needs a good clean out but not sure I can work up the effort to strip the whole thing down to get at it.

[Funkstar]

The only problem with that is getting at the fan can often mean haveing to take the whole thing apart and removeing the heat sink assembly just to get at the fan.

But thats the fun part!

I did this to my previous HP as i figured it would be full of dust. I often lie in bed with in on weekends before i can be bothered getting up etc. But it was pretty clean surprisingly.

[dogie]

Ah right. Under speed step and C1E would the voltage go down further?