Clogged laptop heat pipe and fan

Jeff Liebermann · 2015-08-08T02:40:57+00:00

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: That's about 50% clogged. It took about 45 mins to overheat and shut down in self defense. The owner didn't really notice that there was an overheating problem, but did notice that the machine seemed to run slower when hot. I certainly noticed when I tried to do an image backup for 100 GBytes of kids games and found that it overheated and shut down in the middle of the backup (3 times). Note that the picture was AFTER I had hit the fan with my 60 psi air hose from every conceivable angle to try and clear out the crud. No luck. Here's what I had to do to the laptop to clean it out: General lack of easy maintenance features is one reason I don't like HP products. 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...

Aug 08, 2015 24 Replies

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avagadro7 10 years ago

AE6KS

those grippers are cuttable nicely anchoring an Amazon Otter Samsung5

......

the 1705E's fan left fan went out. An English site gave the screw by screw takeapart. I was surprised finding no access plate....intro laptop.

I was involved in a new mixing room project at a major yum yum pie factory. One day several gnomish bakers came in milling around the entry double door s where dough carts would come and go...soon a burly suited man dragged a t all thin man in bounced him off the floor several times shouting waving his arms pointing at the door, grabbing the thin man's lapels ect then throwin g him out

you got it....the new door was in a major wrong place in a new finished wal l.

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Tim R 10 years ago

ors where dough carts would come and go...soon a burly suited man dragged a tall thin man in bounced him off the floor several times shouting waving h is arms pointing at the door, grabbing the thin man's lapels ect then throw ing him out

all.

One day in a cardboard box factory the boss grabbed me and told me to make a drawing of the die room where the new rotating storage rack system was to go. (kind of like that conveyor your dry cleaning goes on only industrial sized)

He was VERY clear. He did NOT want it to scale. He wanted it in an hour s o he could generate a contract. Do NOT waste time drawing it to scale. Pr obably told me 3 times.

But if you know the dimensions, it's just as fast to draw it to scale, so I did.

Turned out the rack system couldn't fit in the room! We had to redesign, b ut catching that mistake saved the company a lot of time and money. (not t hat I saw any of it)

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avagadro7 10 years ago

NOT building a Dell with fan access doors suggests Dell cooling fans or fans generally run on but my fan did not....I dunno the stats on cooling but we are here...

the larger room fans run on....

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Michael A. Terrell 10 years ago

Plenty of water oak around here. :(

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Jeff Liebermann 10 years ago

Yep. We're slowly loosing our local white, red, and tan oaks to phytophthora ramorum (sudden oak death). Rumor has it that it's caused by puns and bad joaks.

Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558

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