So yesterday I did something I’ve never done before – I took my laptop apart. Probably not the most common pastime for most people, but the thing to remember is that I work in IT and I studied engineering, so in a way it’s funny that it took me this long.
Anyway, I’ve had my laptop for a few years, and for a long while now leaving it on for more than ten minutes had it doing a pretty good impersonation of a radiator (it got bloody hot bloody fast). But it wasn’t until yesterday that I finally decided to do anything about it. I rely on my laptop for work and for this fine blog, not to mention all the daily computer crap that we lasted for millennia without and these days can’t be gone from for more than five minutes. And, in hindsight, I’m amazed it took me this long to try to fix it.
Turns out it was shockingly easy. I followed some instructions I found on the internet, because pulling a laptop apart is not something you want to screw up (obviously), and it came apart without a hitch. I cleaned out a heap of dust – and I mean a heap – and put it back together, no problems. The moment of truth came when I turned it back on and voila, it worked exactly the same, so thankfully I hadn’t screwed it up.
The best part, though, was when I switched it on, and waited… and waited… and waited… and it never got hot. Where once it got so hot I almost couldn’t touch it, it now feels barely warm, even after it’s been on for hours.
So the moral of the story is, if your laptop is overheating and you’ve got the guts to do it, it’s not the hardest thing in the world to take it apart and clean it out, which just might get it working as it should. You just have to be very careful while you’re doing it, because, I mean, can you imagine if something went wrong?