Acer Aspire 3680/5570/5580 laptop cooling mod

I've owned my Acer Aspire 5570 with T2450 Core Duo 2.0GHz CPU for about 2 years now and lately I was fed up with it severely overheating. If put under max load after 10minutes the laptop gets VERY hot to touch, about 65C (CPU temp 75C according to RMClock utility).
I decided to see what I can do to improve cooling.
After spending a good amount of time looking for service manual I found one on ed2k network and set it download. Eager to get the things rolling I took it apart blindly (wasn't hard at all) and of course, right when I was done with the last screw the service manual finished downloading... *sigh* (I cannot post service guide here due to the forum rules. Use google).
I have cleaned the heatsinks (wasn't much there), replaced the cheap & poor quality thermal paste with AS5 and then I noticed that about 3/4 of air vent on the bottom of the laptop (where air gets sucked in) was blocked by a piece of removable plastic, whereas the fan was big enough to use the whole vent.

I removed the plastic to uncover the whole vent. And then i realized that I'll need something to prevent hairs, etc, entering through the vent. Luckily, I remembered I had an old dead Dell in the closet and after digging through lots of old PC junk i was able to uncover it. The air vent on it was covered with an air-filter net and it happened to be big enough to fit on my Acer laptop. It took me about 5 minutes to tear it off the base and after cutting it to the right size I placed it on the sticky residue left from the plastic sticker and ended up with this:

I made sure it attaches to the base of the laptop securely and quickly assembled the laptop back. Turned it on... And i was amazed at how much air was coming out of the vent!
I decided to put it under heavy load... I set foobar2000 for encoding 1,000 mp3s in two threads and went to get a snack. When i came back after 10minutes, I touched the laptop on the bottom and on the keyboard and for a second I actually thought that I forgot to start the encoding process -- the temp of the casing was only ~5C above room temperature!!! Even though RMClock reported only 6-8C drop as compared to temp before mod the case was MUCH cooler than before the mod. I guess with that plastic sheet blocking the vent there was not enough cool air coming in so hot air was trapped inside the laptop, heating up the case.
After i stopped the encoding the temp went from 69C to 48C (according to RMClock) in 30 (!) seconds.

I hope some of you still have those Acer Aspire or some other Acer models laying around and you might find this information useful.

A word of caution though. A member of another notebook board has reported that this mod caused his machine to be unstable. He found out that the GPU is overheated, and suggested that Acer has purposely prevented the fan from sucking too much cool air through the main vent, forcing it to suck air from the other vents, thus cooling down RAM, WiFi and supposedly GPU. He ended up reverting the mod to fix stability issues.

I nor anyone else I did this mod for have reported any stability issues.


PS: It might also be of help to remove plastic sicker from vent on the memory cover, but don't forget to add some air-filter net (just so that something like a paper clip doesn't get in and shorts the motherboard).

 

I have a 5570Z that is in need of a cooling fan replacement. Would you have some kind of instructions to do the replacement?
Thanks
Rick
[email protected]