Laptop Surgery

Shira's laptop has been dying lately. Not getting errors, or crashing, but just plain turning off. This is frustrating to say the least. My guess as to why this was happening was that the laptop was getting too hot and triggering the heat sensor. I guess it's better to shut off the machine and than burn out the hardware.

We confirmed this a bit by noticing: (a) the laptop gets ridiculously hot and (b) by running DTemp, a simple program to tell you how hot your hard drive is. Our hard drive was getting over 109F, which I think is way hotter than it should be.

But what to do about it?

Tonight the laptop died again, and I was frustrated enough to actually do something. So what did I do? I grabbed some tiny screwdrivers and started taking out screws. I wasn't exactly sure of my plan, but I figured some value might come from it.

I found the hard drive and memory bays, and everything looked normal. Then I found the heat sink. When I finally removed the heat sink, exposing the processor, I was greeted with the site below.

Yikes! Check out all that dust! So, my theory is that all the dust was blocking the ventilation from the fan, thereby causing the laptop to overheat and shutdown.

I cleared away the dust, and put the laptop back together. And get this, I had no extra parts!

Now we just have to play the waiting game, and see if that helps.