Fixing my Hot Laptop

Fixing Overheating Laptop

My personal laptop is a Lenovo Thinkpad E430, 2012 Model which apart from its tough built has survived the time but many upgrade and repair to survive through college and even part school also, with $$ spent on both hardware and even appearance upgrade

• RAM Upgrade
• HDD replacement under Warranty
• HDD to SSD Upgrade
• New Skin and Stickers
• Battery Replacement
• New Charging Adapter

Even with aging hardware specs it still gets the job done until I didn’t start its meltdown countdown by heavy tasks such as Video editing or Android Studio or games, so with most of the things in browser from Machine Learning to coding it was doing well, I did dual boot into Linux and underclocked the CPU Frequency in Summer to keep the temperature in safe Range or use cooling Pad in keeping the temperature down I even closed the laptop and kept it upside down with the external mouse, keyboard, and Monitor attached to let the room Air Cool its bottom and CPU temp monitor in every OS I booted in to keep a check on temperature which got me through past 2 yrs.

Nearing Meltdown

I had planned to buy a new system in 2020, which got delayed first due to start of covid and shortage of laptop specially thinkpads, later with Work laptop in place and using a cloud VM credit on Azure with college email ID got me further, and Apple’s release of Apple Silicon just made me hold longer as seeing my use case ARM-powered mac checked all boxes, fast forward to Summer 2021 the laptop is easily reaching 100 degree with even cooling pad and every trick with even medium workloads and even once failed to boot when overheated, running the laptop at that temp would sooner or later kill the CPU at this rate

Let it Burndown ?

I did clean it every few months for dust but didn’t give much thought to changing thermal pate as putting more $$ in the computer I was going to soon replace didn’t justify, until this week with the start of summer the laptop easily jumped to 100 degrees with even minimal workloads that needed to fix otherwise it was going to die for sure this summer

So with over the year accumulated knowledge of watchings 100’s of hours of Linus Tech Tips on Youtube, I found a thermal paste was easy knowing the popular brands and application techniques knowing thermal cooling pad for CPU aren’t an option and I needed thermal paste with zero electrical conductivity so that I don’t end up frying the components with spillage, without wanting to spend much $$ , Cooler MasterGel Regular seemed a good deal with me getting easy applicator packaging, trusted brand knowing it won’t wear out or cause any complication over time and especially a wipe with Alcohol included in package made it easier to clean the older paste knowing it won’t damage electrical components

Repair

the repair went easier than thought and components were easy to take apart and for fun, I recorded the whole procedure Video on youtube

Result

The Idle temp is now about 45 Degree and even under max load the temp never reaches beyond 70 Degree even after hours of usage and no meltdown now

Let’s see how long it works without another technical issue until it is replaced by an ARM device :)