If your notebook fan starts running faster more often you need to blow it out. I noticed mine was running faster than usual. I took it in the garage, pulled off all the covers and blew it out with an air hose. Lots of dust came out of the air intake. Now it runs normal again.
-- LSMFT I look outside this morning and everything was in 3D!
Unless your air source has a moisture trap as one for a paint sprayer would, it's pretty stupid to use a shop air compressor to blow shit off electronic stuff. Even more so with hyper-sensitive electronics found in a computer.
-- Live Fast, Die Young and Leave a Pretty Corpse
It might be obvious to people in this group, but I'll say it anyhow. The same applies to desktop computers. The CPU and graphics-card fans can accumulate a great deal of shmutz. These can usually be cleaned out with a cottom swab.
A blast of canned, compressed gas is what I use on ours in conjunction with a vacuum crevice tool. Once a month. I built my new quad core AMD PhenomII 955 3.2ghz a month ago and just got done cleaning it. I run the fans slow, 2500 rpm on the CPU and run a large 120 mm fan on the back. Nice and quiet that way but still don't see temps above 50c. My kid has a
3ghz P4. I also remove the fan from the CPU heatsink and blow dust out of it. And around the power distribution area. As we know heat kills mobo caps. My new Asus M4A78T-E mobo is supposed to have high quality poly caps. It looks like it does as i don't see any of the traditional shrink- wrapped caps inside. These are all solid metal. no seams.-- Live Fast, Die Young and Leave a Pretty Corpse
It also helps to use ball-bearing fans. Noticeably quieter, and they cost only a little more.
The 120 I tore out of a Coolmaster 650 watt PSU that belonged to my nephew and bit the dust (no pun intended) early in life. It is a ball bearing fan with curved blades that is very quiet. It's just a DC fan, two wire but the Asus mobo is able to control its speed without RPM feedback from the fan. It's all in an Antec ATX case. Lots of room. I do have 3 SATA drives inside, two 320 gigs and one 500 gig. The case is designed to draw cool air in and around the drive by virtue of their location up front and they are barely warm to the touch. Lots of people don't realize that heat is responsible for most early drive failures barring suffering g-forces. I've had two Maxtor 160 gig PATA drives spinning 24/7 in external fan-cooled USB 2.0 cases since 2004. These attach to a Linksys network storage device. Keep em cool and don't bounce them around and they will last, barring manufacture defects.
-- Live Fast, Die Young and Leave a Pretty Corpse
Nicely done, but you may still have some blockage. Many laptops have a small gap between the fan venturi outlet and a series of copper fins connected to a heat pipe. You can see the copper fins through the grill work. The problem is that the dust balls get stuck in between the fan and the copper fins. I've blown these out with an air compressor (80 psi with water trap) and still find myself having to open the case and pull out the dust ball with tweezers.
-- 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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