Acer Travelmate 250 Overheating Problem

09:45.47 - Tuesday 28th August 2007 (Link to This Entry)

My brother had recently aquired an old, slightly battered Acer Travelmate 250 and was experiencing problems with it shutting down whenever he did anything remotely CPU-intensive. A quick examination showed a lot of dust around the vent ports and a lot of crapware running on the machine - a recipe for hot CPU action if ever there was one.

First step was to disassemble the machine to get at the cooling system. The disassembly procedure was fairly straightforward:

Prise off the hinge covers at the rear corners of the case to expose the hinges.
Unscrew the button plate and remove it.
Unclip and remove the keyboard.

The cooling fan, heat transfer pipes and heatsink are now all exposed. These are held in place with four spring-loaded screws on the body of the cooler, and a small metal bracket at the left hand side with three small screws. Once all these are removed, you can wiggle the cooler back and forth until it comes away from the CPU.

It was immediately obvious that the heatsink and fan were caked in dust and grime. Not only that, but there was far too much thermal transfer compound between the CPU and the heatsink which was having the opposite of the desired effect and actually acted as an insulator, preventing the cooler from doing it's job.

K set about the heatsink with the Dyson while I cleaned up the CPU. Once both pieces were spotless I put a tiny, rice grain sized blob of Arctic Silver thermal transfer compound on the top of the processor and worked it over the entire surface using my finger. I gave the copper block of the cooler a final polish and reseated it, wiggling it back and forth a few times to ensure the closest, flattest contact between the two surfaces.

After that it was a simple case of reassembling the machine, reformatting and reinstalling Windows and - voila! A quiet, cool machine that hasn't shut down once since the operation. The fan is now a lot quieter and the case of the machine is a lot cooler. Not only that, but the removal of all the cycle-hogging crapware has sped the machine up noticably, giving it a new lease of life.