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On some really hot sunny day back in May 2003 I remember working from home in sweltering conditions. It was hot and humid outside, and inside my study
it was very stuffy with no airflow at all. I was working from home and my Advent laptop was being heavily abused running abnormal intensive processor applications.
When suddenly I no idea what hit me but I instinctly hit [Ctrl] + [S] = save document and all of a sudden my laptop shutdown for no apparent reason.
Weird I thought, had I been hacked? had someone got past my ZoneAlarm and maliciously rebooted my laptop? I had no idea what was going on until I powered up the
laptop again and on this occasion the laptop was extremely HOT! Not only that, I could smell burnt/singed plastic/burnt electrics, almost like when you wire a
plug wrong and turn on the socket.
I then quickly grabbed my cheap Argo's desk fan and turned that on to blow cool air into the grill to cool things down attempting to ease the potential damage
that the overheating could have caused. Its standard practice nowadays when processors get too hot for laptops to automatically shut down. I hit the power switch on the
laptop and could hear the fan but no air being blown out from the grill or no air being drawn in from the vent underneath the laptop.
After a bit of braveness and guidance from Spaggie I decided to take the laptop apart to investigate the cause of the overheating. My gut feeling was the fan on the processor broke! But when I took
the laptop notebook apart the culprit of overheating was dust blocking the airways. See below for graphical representation.
Note: by taking the case of the laptop this will void your warranty.
Laptop with all the bits attached
First of all you will need a very very small philips screwdriver (laptop screwdrivers can be purchased from maplin's website.) as shown in the diagram below you need
to unscrew the screw being pointed at by the tip of the screwdriver
Screw driver pointing at screw.
When that is unscrewed you will see the next diagram, a blanking plate with six screws, you need to be careful when unscrewing as you dont want to lose these little
screws. tip: when unscrewing attach a small nob of blue-tac to end of screwdriver to avoid losing the screws.
After unscrewing the six screws gently lift off the plate. When you lift of the plate you will see the diagram below
Once the plate is off you can now see how the cooling works and why the laptop overheats especially if there is dust blocking the ducts. Its best practice to use a
can of compressed air to blow the dust away, otherwise gently blow on the dust to remove it or even use a cotton buds if need be.
Once this has been done, reassemble your laptop and now you should be able to notice the difference.
Good luck
If you need any further information then visit the unofficial Advent Support Forums
(c) Cheester - no responsibility or liability can be accepted for information used on these
pages
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