Dusty CPU fans.
When a heatsink meant for a 3.6GHz still causes your 2.0GHz CPU to overheat when doing normal day-to-day tasks like coding some programs — you know something is wrong.
See, I was just writing some codes and updating Windows when without warning, my system rebooted on its own because it had reached its safety limit. Motherfu…
That was the last straw. Previously, I was too lazy and resorted to opening the CPU casing to allow more ventilation which worked for awhile.. but apparently the dust damage was too bad.
The black cottons are dust clogged in the heatsink fins
Start cleaning up!
All right, it was a sign that I should get off my lazy ass and do something.
Usually I would get my brother to do the dirty job, but today I had no choice as it was too sudden. I unplugged all the wires and lowered the CPU tower to the floor to begin my clean-up.
And to Pat who doesn’t know that CPU needs vacuuming or removal of dust, now you do.
Getting to the heatsink
I didn’t know how to get to the fins of the heatsink. My initial idea led me to believe that I had to remove my graphics card because it was blocking the access. So I proceeded. I unscrewed the side of it and unclipped it, attempting to release it from the motherboard. Motherfu… it got stucked.
Fine. I didn’t dare to exert too much force so I had to look for workaround. Well, it didn’t take too long before I figured that the entire heatsink case could be removed from the top, the accessible side.
The top can be unscrewed easily
Packing up
Once the cover was removed, I quickly vacuumed the dust and managed to put everything back, except for the graphics card I semi-removed earlier on — I couldn’t clip it back.
But I still tried booting up, no luck. So I messaged Eric and asked if a computer would refuse to boot up without VGA detection and then give off funny beeps. Yup, that was the case. At last, trials and errors worked and I had it back in place.
And for the first time in my life figured that it wasn’t that hard to remember how to plug the wires back where they belonged. It was a pretty no-brainer, so much for my phobia of messing things up that I didn’t want to touch them for the past decade.
Results
After completing a game of DoTA (which would cause the computer to restart due to overheating before), I found that the temperature peaked at 54 degrees celsius only, as opposed to the overheating 74 degrees.
And finally no more annoying “CPU fan not working” warning before booting into Windows. The mere one hour of effort paid off, great.