04-08-2010, 11:08 PM
Lets say your laptop is running hotter then it used to (you tell tell this buy the 3rd degree burns it leaves on your lap) or it overheats and shuts down periodically. You read on the internet, or were told by your "computer guy" that you should clean it our with a can of air.
This would not necessarily be incorrect. Dust, cat hair, and pocket lint all collect in the tiny fins of the laptops cooling system and around the fan. This makes the cooling system inefficient and may be the cause of your overheating problems.
But resist the temptation to rush out to buy a can of compressed air and blow it into the side vent of your laptop.
This will tend to blow anything in the cooling system back towards the fan in a big wad, jamming up the system fan completely. (this is usually bad....)
The best thing to do is disassemble your laptop and blow it out from the inside. There are plenty of guides on the internet on how to disassemble different laptop models (google is your friend here). Just be slow and patient, especially with ribbon cables and prying apart of plastic parts. Feel free to wonder like I do, why there are 50 screws holding the thing together. I mean does and extra 40 screws really make a plastic laptop case all that much more durable if you were to drop it??? (Feel free to forward this thought to laptop manufactures
)
Nick
This would not necessarily be incorrect. Dust, cat hair, and pocket lint all collect in the tiny fins of the laptops cooling system and around the fan. This makes the cooling system inefficient and may be the cause of your overheating problems.
But resist the temptation to rush out to buy a can of compressed air and blow it into the side vent of your laptop.
This will tend to blow anything in the cooling system back towards the fan in a big wad, jamming up the system fan completely. (this is usually bad....)
The best thing to do is disassemble your laptop and blow it out from the inside. There are plenty of guides on the internet on how to disassemble different laptop models (google is your friend here). Just be slow and patient, especially with ribbon cables and prying apart of plastic parts. Feel free to wonder like I do, why there are 50 screws holding the thing together. I mean does and extra 40 screws really make a plastic laptop case all that much more durable if you were to drop it??? (Feel free to forward this thought to laptop manufactures
) Nick