Remove any dust, clean the fan spindle and add a drop of oil.
All the HP laptop fans I’ve ever had fail sooner or later, resulting in overheating and the main reason for this is that laptops suck in lots of dust over the months. This dust sticks to everything, the fan blades, the fins around the fan, and most critically, dust turns the tiny amount of lubricant on the fans spindle into thick, black goo (technical term!).
If your laptop fan looks like this, it’s time for an overhaul with a thorough clean and a drop of light oil.
This is what the inside of the laptop casing looked like around the fan area after a couple of years…
The ease of the maintenance I’m about to describe depends on the model of your laptop. I don’t know why laptop fans don’t have their own ‘easy-to-remove’ cover, but on my HP, getting at the fan is the devils underpants. I need to remove just about everything, including the motherboard. It’s a bit like the heater/fan in your car, the car is built around it making it a bugger to get to.
That said; dismantling your laptop is not difficult as long as you follow a few rules…
- Take care to avoid static electricity (use a cheap earthing strap).
- Don’t lose the small screws (pop them in a small container as you remove them).
- Mark the laptop frame or take notes to remind you what size screw goes where.
- Don’t force anything, check for missed or hidden screws if something won’t budge.
- Try to find a video detailing the dismantling of your model before you start (it doesn’t matter what for particularly, just the process of taking the casing apart).
- Be gentle with components, remove connectors carefully, avoid hard surfaces etc.
- Start and finish in one session, your memory of ‘what goes where’ stays fresh.
Ok, so now you have opened up your laptop and have the fan in your slightly trembling hands; time for the cure…
Grab a cotton bud and dip it in a degreasing cleaner. Isopropanol/Isopropyl alcohol/Iso is the ‘gold standard’ cleaner here, but I’ll be honest, I use a mild nail polish remover based on acetone or the red spirit fuel I use in my camping stove, both work well. Gently wipe the cotton bud all around the fan spindle and surrounding area. Flip the cotton bud over and wipe away the excess cleaner with the dry end. Pop the fan back on and off a couple of times and repeat the cleaning process using new cotton buds each time. Replacing the fan a few times will pull out more of the dirty lubricant from the hole inside the fan ‘motor’ which is generally too small to clean.
Once you’ve cleaned the spindle a couple of times or so, the cotton bud should be coming away pretty clean. Dry off any residue cleaner with a dry cotton bud (if you haven’t already) and lubricate the fan spindle with a single drop of a light machine oil (3-in-one type). Pop the fan on and off a couple of times to move the lube around and you’re pretty much good to go. Gently flicking the fan should see it spin freely now.
Now might be a good time to note down those part numbers in case your fan totally buys the farm in the near future. Most are pretty cheap to replace.
Reassembly is a reverse of what you did to get to the fan, with the addition of applying new heat sink paste (if you disturbed the original) between the processor and the fans heat sink assembly (the sticky stuff you wondered about when you took the fan apart…). This paste ensures a good conduction or pull of heat from and away from the processor and out of the laptop casing. Sometimes the paste stays flexible and you can just gently scrape it up and spread it out over the processor again. Or just put the whole thing back exactly as it was if you have no alternative.
Common sense tells me that adding oil to laptop fans in a dusty environment is going to require future maintenance. This is why I so recommend using a hardware monitor such as openhardwaremonitor.org to keep track of your core temperatures. Be prepared to repeat the cleaning and lubricating of your laptop fan from time to time as you notice it getting too hot or overheating. Trust me, you’ll get really good at getting to your fan once you’ve done it a couple of times 🙂
Stay well
Ian
