HELP! 1420 How to Clean the Fan?

My Inspiron 1420's fan has sticky dust on it and its not blowing much air at all. This is a serious problem. The CPU area gets much hotter than before. The fan is in such a place you can't just open a panel and access it.

I tried taking the whole bottom side out but after taking a LOT of screws out it still didn't come lose, maybe its not suppose to either. Now how do I clean this fan and the vent? Making me very angry at Dell for this lousy design. There should always be a removable panel under the fan.

 

get a can of compressed air

 

Thanks for the reply. But I think that process would instead push dirt farther in. There is a post on using the canned air which I just replied to saying its probably a bad idea. I'm trying to take dirt out not push farther in. Moreover, when I start the laptop afther the air treatment, the fan is going to blow the lose dirt right onto the CPU!

 

The fan's not going to blow the dirt into the cpu, the heatsink maybe but not the cpu. The way most laptops are designed is that the screws on the bottom actually holds the palmrest in place, not the bottom casing of the laptop. Go to dell's support website and look for a service manual. The basic steps are simply to remove all the screws, then remove the panel above the keyboard, then remove the keyboard itself, then remove the monitor, and finally after making sure all the screws on top are out, fiddle around with the top of the palm rest and gently pry it off starting from the top and working your way down while noticing any missed screws or clips on the edge of the palmrest.