Opening a Dell Inspiron 1720!

Hai gaise, long time no see?

Last night, I opened my Dell Inspiron 1720 (specifications in my signature) with the help of this website, to clean it.

I opened it till this step -



I cleaned this part, and vacuum cleaned the body. There was so much junk!

The temperatures are down, and everything is working fine (it's good, considering it was the first time I'd opened anything! )

But what I want to know is, should I have gone further to open it up and clean, or was it good enough? I didn't bother because since it was my first time, I was not confident, and I thought this is enough.

And, there are little 6 cables near WiFi card, can I attach any two to it? I forgot which ones I removed, and attached two of the same color. Everything is working fine though.

Also, the screen has "lost" some space on all the sides. I mean, there is a small black boundary around my screen. How do I stretch it back?

 

What resolution is it displaying?

 

1440*900.

 

It's like this -

 

Try changing your resolution or installing latest gpu drivers.

 

Did both.

 

Errrr....I digged in, looking back, it seems that I've always had it! This pic was taken when I just got this notebook.

 

To answer the original question, just cleaning the heatsink should be sufficient for basic maintenance. If you wanted to be thorough, you could indeed open it up further and clean out every nook and cranny, but you'll be hitting a point of diminishing returns, and it won't make much of a difference to the final temps.

 

It's generally good enough for most 1720 users. Generally the dust bunnies get stuck around the heatsink area and the fan blades. For maximum cleaniness, I presumed you have tried removing the GPU and the CPU heatsinks and copper pipes? Remove and set them aside, use a blower or compressed air into the heatsinks and vents of these two components.

You can also try removing the entire motherboard and speakers, wires etc. and clean them, but not entirely necessarily.

Generally we just leave the other 6 coloured wires where they are. They're for the extra PCM cards if you have any. If not, then they have no effect whatsoever.

The 1720 offers two kinds of resolutions, 1440x900 and 1920x1200. I presume yours is the 1440x900 native as according to your sig?

In all, if you want to reduce your temps further you can try applying AS5/MX2 cooling paste to your CPU and GPU, and undervolt the CPU. But generally the 1720s are known for their excellent cooling, so that should not be of a concern.