Wow, cleaned up my dusty R52, really makes a difference

Just a normal unremarkable story about when I cleaned up the guts of my R52...(2gb ram, hitachi 100gb 7200rpm, WLAN off)


Been on for most of the time during the 1½ year I've had it. I didn't notice it until the temperatures around here began to rise (Winters in Japan are cold, and they don't seem to be particulary fond of using what we would call 'Insulation') and my computer ran hotter and hotter.

I first noticed it by the touchpad getting hot despite me not using the WLAN , then I threw a glance at the temp values and found out I IDLED at around 60 - 65 centigrades. Well, and it went on and stayed like that for a month then I noticed that the temp rose quite rapidly upon load, easily hitting 75 - 80 centigrades. And so the other day to really find out how hot this thing gets under load i fired up mobile meter (to constantly monitor the temp and MHz) together with PRIME95 and ran one of those torture tests.

Didn't take long to hit 80, 85....rose up to 90, at 95 the CPU underclocked itself to 800Mhz then went up to 1.6GHz when the temp hit the 90 mark, then the temp rose etc etc.

Went down to the local computer mart around here, bought a can of compressed air, opened up the computer and cleaned up the innards till they shone like new. Maen, talk about dustcollectors.

Fired up the coputer and it now IDLES around 50 in this hot room, a torture test brings it up to 85 at most (fan's still going on mode 3 a la 3900rpm). the only downside is that I can hear the fan a lot clearer now ;-)

A word of advice, I don't know if it's the particular brand I bought but these aerosol cans get's COLD! Like...frost forms on the outside of the can cold during usage, and it happens in a blink, before I knew it I'd "burnt" my fingertips on the thing...

 

All compressed air bottles work like that

If I was a chem major, I'm sure theres a simple explanation.

Anyway, I'm glad you fixed the problem.

I had a similar problem with my desktop. A few weeks ago, I started getting random freezes. So I opened up the computer, dusted the thing out and tried again. Guess what? Random freezes again. So now I think there might be a hardware problem, so I open up the thing again (while the computer is running) and realize that the fan for my Radeon 9800 Pro ISN'T SPINNING. Grrr. There was no dust covering it either, it just didn't wanna spin, so I tried to manually make it spin by just trying to spin the fan myself and it worked
So now, everytime I want to use my computer I have to get on the floor and manually spin the fan until it decides to spin by itself >_>

Ghetto.

 

I did same thing to my PC recently but I had problem with CPU fan, it just wont spin, and after like ~2 minutes my computer just shutdown. I opened it up and found the problem, there was a big chank of dust that stuck in the fan, which I could not see at first. Now it works quit and stable like brand new.

 

I have never opened up a notebook before how would I go about doing what you did? This would not be for the machine in my sig...it would be for my old HP

 

Propane tanks do the same thing, and co2, or most compressed gasses/liquids. A/C does the same thing. Its a property of thermodynamics. compress a gas (such as freon) and it turns into a liquid. Under atmospheric conditions it requires a colder temperature to condense a gas, but it can also be done "artificially" with pressure. So when pressurized it get hot and rejects the added heat (outside A/C unit) and becomes a liquid. When the pressure is released, the liquid returns to gas requiring an addition of heat in the liquid in order for it to become a gas, the heat comes from the surroundings. This makes the object containing the liquid feel cold. The phase shift sucks all the heat out of the surrounding air and can.

Slightly off the thinkpad topic, so ending the thermo lesson.

 

Funny thing, if you will flip cane upside down you can have freeze output.

 

LOL, your only supposed to shoot the air in short burst, it says so right on the can. The chemical that fires out the compressed air is similar to that found in Freon. That's why the can gets ice cold and you'll see ice form along the sides of the can if you hold the trigger to long. Next time try using short burst which is all you really need.

One trick I used to do when I was working in IT back in the 80's was to take a portable vacuum cleaner turn it on so it was sucking air. I would then take a can of compressed air and blow the dust on an angle so that it would immediately get sucked up by the vacuum. Hence no dirt flying all over the place.

 

Don't know about HPs, but in my case i removed the keyboard and sprayed onto the fan, flange, around memory, gave the keyboard a good dustover as well. Then i sprayed the inside of the PCMCIA/Express bay, UltraSlim bay-


Thanks for the explaination about the gas btw. Figured it had to be something like that, I've noticed the same phenomena with propane tanks yeah.


Actually, I don't think it says anything about bursting the air on my japanese can. It warns about holding th ecan at an angle above 45 degrees, spray into containers and fires (HFC-152a). ... wait it..ahh yeah okay 2-3 seconds at a time. Ahhhh, but ...bursting is for wussies! ;-)