Anyone replace the thermal paste on a Vostro 1500?

An update. I got my ceramic paste today "Arctic Ceramic" and I was off to finish the job. It took me a whopping 25 minutes from start to finish. I removed the HDD, DVD drive, palm rest, LCD panel etc.

I removed the CPU heatsink and I cleaned the heatsink and CPU with rubbing alcohol, that was all I did before applying the thermal paste. I replaced the thermal paste on one CPU and applied thermal paste to the other even though it uses a thermal pad.

Honestly I was expecting the thing to blow up literally and give me an excuse to go buy a V13.

To my amazement not only did my laptop boot but the CPU runs 10c cooler and now maxes out at 45c not 67c. My nvidia 8400GS GPU not maxes out at 50c and not 61c while playing certain games.

The only weird thing was I purposely did not follow correct protocol and the thing works awesome. So much for instructions, right?

 

Hey Rodknee, just checking to see if you've had any problems using Arctic5 on the GPU instead of a thermal pad.

My Vostro 1500 is aging. I just clean out all my dust bunnies recently (and removed all of the lovely finger prints the Dell factory left on my copper tubing...ketchup is your friend).

I was thinking of getting some Arctic 5 on my CPU and GPU, but I don't want to beef my GPU if the paste won't last long term.

Paz

 

I gave up my Vostro 1500 last March. I miss the keyboard. I do not miss lugging 8 lbs around.

Bronsky