HP Envy m6 laptop (with AMD A10 processor), which arrive with a bad case of overheating. Here's what the radiator grill looked like after I tore apart the laptop to clean out the filth:
Here's what I had to do to the laptop to clean it out:
The real problem is the mechanical design. The grill on the heat pipe is made for maximum cooling, not minimum filth accumulation. I did an experiment once with some dog hair clippings (don't ask) to see what really happens when a laptop sucks in short hair cuttings. The long hairs are blocked by the small holes in the grill work. The dust goes right through and out the exhaust port. However, tiny hair fragments between about 4 to 6 mm go through the holes, through fan, and get jammed up against the radiator grill. Initially, most of these short hairs went right through, but as the few that got stuck increased, more and more began to get caught until air flow was constricted to about 30% of maximum. It happened quite fast and was impressive to watch through a clear plastic fake cover. (I should do a YouTube video). After the test, I found that I could easily blow out most of the hair because there was no grease or goo to hold the fur ball in place. The laptop in the photo was possibly used near something that produced greasy fumes (kitchen or oil burning furnace). It took about
3 years to look like the photo. I forgot to take a photo of the fan. It was fairly clean except for greasy dirt stuck to the blades. I could hear the fan struggling, but it was against the back pressure, not friction from the filth. Again, the picture was AFTER I had blown out the laptop with 60 PSI compressed air from my blow gun in both directions.