My mom has an old IBM Thinkpad that was just starting to get a little old. Okay, so it's way old. Throwing 20 or 30 dollars at it though is a lot cheaper than going out and buying a new one so that is why I did in this post.
First of all let me say that you have to be careful when you work on a laptop. Or any computer, really. I tried to blow the dust out of it with an air nozzle on an air compressor and while it did great at blowing the dust out, it also did great at blowing all the blades off the fan. So that is the first thing I set out to fix:
Take note of the fuzzy kitty stickers mod.
First up is to remove the keyboard.
There are 3 screws on the bottom of the laptop with a little keyboard symbol. Remove those, then you gently pry the keyboard toward the screen till the tabs have enough clearance and you lift it out.
You have to gently pull the cable that connects the keyboard to the motherboard and it comes right off. We now have access to the RAM (which we will get to later when the new sticks arrive) and partial access to the fan/heat-sink.
Little sticky thingers hide screws for removing the the touch pad and palm rest. Remove those. There are also a few more screws that need to be removed that have the touch pad symbol by them.
Gently pull out the touch pad ribbon cable.
And this is why you don't use compressed air out of a garage air-compressor for blowing dust out of a laptop. You should use a can of air, a vacuum, or physically remove the fan and heat sink and scrub the dust off of it all.
Some of the fan blades were just sitting there. I had to shake the laptop in a few different directions to get all the broken pieces out.
For these old IBMs the heat sink and fans came as a combo. You can get just the fan, but I'm not sure how you remove it from the heat sink yet. This refurbished one from Ebay was only 10 bucks with free shipping.
Next I used my Arctic Silver thermal compound kit and I cleaned the old compound off the CPU and the GPU and the refurbed heat sink.
The refurbished heat sink had a new thermal pad install already for the GPU so I applied a daub to the CPU and installed the new thing.
Close up of the new fan, notice it's power cord is plugged into the motherboard.
The GPU heat pickup.
Until the rest of the parts arrive, that is all.
No comments:
Post a Comment