I upgraded the RAM in my laptop yesterday, and stumbled onto a really easy maintenance job that will most certainly prolong the life your laptop, and help it run faster, cooler and quieter. It sounds impossible to do all that in one fell swoop, but it’s really easy to do, and it works. I’ll give you a hint: it has to do with your laptop’s cooling.

I realize your laptop is going to be different than mine, so my photos may not help you much when it comes to doing this on your own laptop, but bear with me, the principle is the same, and this simple clean-up job will really help.

What I’m talking about is the laptop’s cooling fan assembly. It’s the fan that cools the processor’s heatsink, and is responsible for keeping the processor below the upper temperature threshold. It’s like your car’s radiator. If it wasn’t working, your car would overheat very fast, wouldn’t it? Same thing here, except your laptop’s “radiator” is prone to getting clogged up with dust – lots of it, too.

After about a year and half of using my laptop mostly on clean tables — not on carpets, or my lap, or on tablecloths, as some of us do [!] — I was very, very surprised to find out how much dust had accumulated on my laptop’s cooling grill. I didn’t even open my laptop in order to inspect it. I just wanted to install some extra RAM, but saw the cooling fan and figured, hey, let me open it up even though it looks clean enough from the outside. Boy, was I in for a shocker! Have a look at this photo to see for yourselves.

You may not think that layer of dust is much, but have a look at a macro photo I took of a piece of it. I used a moist cotton swab to pull off the dust from the grill. Can you see how thick it was? It’s a wonder any air managed to get through!

In case you’re wondering how I removed the cover from the cooling fan, it’s simple. There were four small screws holding it in place. They were each about the size of those screws you find in the frames of your eyeglasses, so you can use the small screwdriver from a frame repair kit. (If you’re a geek like me, you probably have your own mini-screwdriver set.) After using moist cotton swabs to thoroughly clean the grill, I blew through the grill from both sides of the laptop to make sure no dust was stuck inside. I was out of air spray, so I just used my lungs — if you do the same, be careful, don’t inhale the dust, it doesn’t taste good… Then I also wiped the fan blades clean with more moist cotton swabs, after which I used a couple of dry ones to wipe the entire assembly. Have a look at the finished product. Looks pretty good, doesn’t it?

The important thing to remember is that most people can do this at home, and it’s a completely user-serviceable operation. I didn’t have to remove any warranty stickers (although my laptop’s out of warranty anyway). As a matter of fact, I only removed the panel that’s supposed to give me access to the RAM. It’s a big panel, so it really gives me access to a lot more stuff.

If my laptop managed to get that much dust inside after only a year and a half of normal use (on tables and desks), I can’t imagine how much dust there is in other laptops that get used everywhere, and never get cleaned! To me, it’s a miracle that most survive through their projected 3-year lifetimes, and even last beyond that. I have to wonder how much better they’d run if their owners would take the time to clean them out once in a while. My suggestion is that you schedule time to do this cleaning once a year.After I finished, I noticed a difference right away. My laptop is cooler now, and runs much quieter. Before, the fan ran in overdrive most of the time. Now, it only runs at higher speeds when the processor is crunching through difficult operations, which is the way it should be. It also runs a little faster, and it’s more responsive. This also makes sense, because a cooler processor works better. It’s the same principle behind water-cooled processors, which can be overclocked because their temperatures are kept low.

At any rate, I encourage you to open up your laptops and try this for yourselves. But please, make sure they’re turned off, unplugged from any power source, and the batteries are removed before you even think of opening them up. Also, ground yourselves before you touch the circuits. You don’t want to short anything inside with any static electricity you might generate.