Cleaning Questions

Hey,

It's another cleaning thread. Okay so I am definitely buying the EON-15s by Origin. It's pretty much the same as the clevo and sager 15" laptops.

Judging by the images from the site, there's two cooling vents (one for the GPU and one for CPU). I should clean both of these cooling vents every month or so right? In addition, is it always necessary to apply thermal compounds each time I clean (assuming I have the guts to open the laptop)? Someone said you HAVE to but in most videos I've seen, they don't.

I am a big noob on hardware things. But I have done some googling and what not but I still have some questions.

For the vents that are visible from the outside of the laptop (the two vents on the last image of the site) is it okay just to "blow" the compressed air from the outside or do you have to open up the laptop up and do it from the inside? I've seen videos of both and I'm not too sure which one I should do. I'm a bit scared of opening laptops, fearing that I might screw it up somehow.

Also, is it okay if I just blow the compressed air onto the fans without first removing them out (some videos just do that). I know taking it out would obviously be better but again, I'm too scared to pull anything out.

The video demonstration has always been dells and hps but clearly that's not the laptop in question. So if anyone has these laptops, are they easy to open up and clean?

Big thank you in advance,
DD

 

Unless you have a habit of dragging your machine through dirt or live with a thousand cats, you could probably ignore the vents for the entire time you own the machine and not have any kind of problem.

But, if you want to clean things, go ahead and vacuum things out every once in a while.

Never ever use compressed air, it will only push what dirt there is deeper into the machine.

Thermal paste every month? If anyone actually told you such a thing you'd be well off to start ignoring everything they tell you. Thermal paste, properly applied and undisturbed, should last the lifetime of the machine. If you have another reason to pull the machine apart and separate the cooling rig from the cpu/gpu, you will need to reapply the paste as it's a one-time use kind of thing.

If you don't feel comfortable opening your machine then don't. Simple as that. You can learn the minor skills necessary, isn't hard to do. Just takes some patience and attention to detail and common sense things like remembering where all of the little screws go and NOT LOSING any of the screws. Helps to bing around the 'net some and find a service manual; nothing like having the official disassembly (and reassembly!) instructions to help work along.

Don't worry. Enjoy and use your machine.

 

Hey thanks you for the reply, i read that vacuum may produce static electricity and can damage the laptop though...???

 

In extreme cases; lots of fine dust, very dry air, and high-speed vacuum plus a fair amount of time.

All it takes to suck things out is a few seconds. Turn on vacuum, run it over the vents, turn off vacuum. Done. Once every 4-5-6 weeks IF (and only if) you see crappage.

Again, don't worry. I'd be more concerned with accidental liquid spills, theft, and "droppage" than anything else.

 

I clean my laptop every weekend with vacuum. And take it apart and clean it every other month or so inside. Still, I did just take my laptop apart yesterday, and I did find a bunch of 'dustflowers' under the CPU/GPU heatsink/fan. I cleaned it out and my idle/load CPU tempratures fell from 34/100C (Chipset 110C!!!) to 29/80C (chipset maxed out at 95C). Max tempratures are under extreme burn test. However, my father used my laptop for about a month few months back and it did not get cleaned out. I think the high tempratures were because of that, mainly. Ah, and it is a HP dv5, everybody know it is not a easy laptop to keep cool!