A Huawei MateBook D16 came in from near Al-Maktoum College of Higher Education in the West End. The booking just said to clean it. We booked it in at 2:27pm and got it on the bench in our Perth Road workshop. Laptops don't give much away from the outside, so the bottom cover came off first.
Dust. Lots of it. Both fans were furry with it, thick on the blades and speckled across the housings. A laptop like this has two small fans that pull air in through the vents underneath and push it out through a stack of thin metal fins at the back. A copper heat pipe carries the heat from the processor over to those fins. Dust rides in on that air, and the fans and fins catch it. Over time it builds up until the air can't get through properly, the heat has nowhere to go, and the laptop starts running hot and getting loud.
Next we lifted the copper cooler off the processor. The thermal paste under it had seen better days. There was a grey ring of old paste on the copper plate round a dull, patchy middle, and a heavy, uneven smear of the same stuff on the processor itself. Not pretty. Paste is only there to fill the tiny gaps between the chip and the copper, so heat moves across. It doesn't last forever. Once it goes patchy, it can't do that job properly.
So we got stuck in. We cleaned both fans until the blades were free of dust again, took the old paste off, and put fresh paste on the processor before the cooler went back down. You can see the same fan before and after in the photos. Then it all went back together.
A quick one. It was ready at ten past three, so under an hour from start to finish, and the customer collected it at quarter to four. It went through as a Laptop Service, so no parts were needed.
It's easy to forget there are fans in there at all. Most folk only notice when the laptop starts sounding like a hairdryer. If yours is running hotter or louder than it used to, dust and tired paste are two of the first things we'd check. It's a lot cheaper than a new laptop. Drop it in and we'll take a look.
Need the same repair? See our full Laptop Repair Dundee | Repair Alliance service for pricing and what's covered.
