Toshiba satellite 1805-s207 running hot

[paulsiu]

My girlfriend's Toshiba 1805-S207 recently has been running extremely hot. Whenever she switch on the machine, the fan quickly goes on. I recently install speedfan on her machine and it registered 62C under load. The machine is probably not running a mobile processor. I think it's actually a Pentium Celeron 1.1 Ghz.

I am thinking that it may be dust build up. However, I don't think she'll let me open up the computer (if I break it, she'll probably kill me). What do you suggest? I was thinking about using some compress air into the vents of the machine to loosen the dust and then a vaccum cleaner to shut out the dust. Is this going to damage anything (like getting dust into the CD-ROM or floppy mechanism).

Paul

 

[phisrow]

A hit of canned air can do wonders in these sorts of situations(I dealt with a p4 celeron based system with a heatsink full of fluff once, wasn't at all pretty until it was cleaned out, crashed every 3-5 minutes); but you should be rather careful. If you spin a brushless DC fan(the sort of cooling fans that will certainly be inside the laptop) at high speeds you can kill it. This is very, very, bad. Blowing high speed canned air through the cooling ducts can spin the fan(s) very quickly under some circumstances. If you can, look up the service manual for the system, and figure out where and how many fans it has. If you can immobilize the fan while cleaning the ducts(e.g. a thin rod held gently between the blades to prevent it from turning) then you should be able to safely clear the ducts. A full strip and rebuild is better; but if she won't let you into the box, that isn't really on the table. As for the vacum cleaner, I wouldn't go there if I were you. Those things are rather much for delicate electronics, and they are quite good at generating static. Stick to canned air.

 

[fbrdphreak]

You can get small hand-held vacuums that are designed to remove dust from electronic components. Couldn't tell you where to get one tho.
Definitely google around and look for a hardware manual for disassembling it. I doubt you're going to effect much without opening it up

 

[paulsiu]

Well, my plan was to do the following:

1. Wait overnight for the computer to cool (I recall compress air tend to be really cold, so I didn't want to crack hot components.

2. Insert some sticks to prevent the fan from spinning (I didn't realize that spinning the fan could destroy it. Thanks phisrow)

3. Blast compress air on the different vents.

4. Use the house vaccum to suck out the loose dust bunnies. Those little hand vac that fbrdphreak suggest may be a good idea, but I recall they were too weak to suck out the dust.