How to Clean your Laptop Fan and Avoid Overheating

Do you want to know how to clean your laptop fan and avoid overheating? You are on the right spot to know the answer of this question.

Cleaning your laptop’s fan can be a great idea if you’re noticing it getting too hot, too noisy, shutting down due to overheating, or just seeing reduced performance.

In this article, we are going to see some important keys to clean a laptop fan in a simple and efficient way.

When is a time to clean a Laptop Fan?

Cleaning the laptop fan should be a regular process, especially if you have a gaming laptop or do any activity that requires good cooling and high performance. But, above all, there are two great markers of the need to clean the fan:

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Temperatures much higher than normal, compared to previous months. This manifests itself in the form of worse performance, overheating shutdowns, more fan noise (because being dirty it needs to go faster to get the same air through), or simply a very high temperature measurement according to programs like HWiNFO64.

A long time without cleaning the computer inside is not something that is agreed upon, for some it has to be cleaned every few months, we are going to be a little more lax and say that after 2-4 years without cleaning it, it will surely have a lot of accumulated dust.

The biggest enemy of this article is the great difficulty in cleaning certain laptops and opening them. For example, don’t expect to open a latest generation MacBook Pro without it being a real ordeal.

In those cases, it may not even be recommended to open it, or at least not by an inexperienced user. This article focuses mainly on “regular laptops”, because ultra-slim ones are getting harder and harder to open.

How to Clean Your Laptop Fan: Steps to Follow

1. Open laptop

The first step is the most obvious: you must open the laptop to reveal its interior. How is it done? Well, the truth is that it depends a lot on the specific model of laptop.

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This usually just involves removing the screws on the bottom of the computer, then carefully removing the case from there.

The problem is that this case removal can be somewhat difficult, since in addition to the screws the computer is closed with clips, which must be opened calmly, and above all you may need to remove the keyboard part or carry out some complicated process.

2. Locate the Fan

Once you have managed to open the laptop case, you should find one or more radial-type fans. These are characterized by their sense of rotation and, more specifically because you will see them standing still, some blades that look like “blades”. There should be a very small gap that will allow you to clean the fan.

You should find the fan on the same side you opened the laptop case to, but this may not be the case. In that case, you would have to carefully remove the motherboard from the laptop to see the other side.

This includes, but is not limited to, removing the motherboard screws and even opening the other side of the computer case, removing the keyboard, etc.

Check specific information for your laptop model, but normally you do not have to do this, unless you also want to change the thermal paste.

Clean the Fan with the Right tools to Avoid Mistakes

Finally, you’ve managed to get to the laptop fan, and it’s time to clean it. To do this, you can use several different tools, but we are going to recommend two options:

With a clean brush: The brush is a great help to clean dust, including in the most difficult points, and it is really effective.

Even more so if you use a brush with an antistatic material, designed for this specifically, instead of a painter’s brush.

With a can of compressed air: This can give you the best possible user experience, but be careful as using the bottle in the wrong orientation could condense liquid.

In addition, below we will explain that if you do not block the rotation of the fan you can damage it.

You must be very careful not to damage the fan. Whichever method you use, but especially if you use compressed air, you should avoid the temptation to spin the fan while you clean it.

It is very comfortable and even pleasurable to hit it with compressed air and watch it spin at full speed, but this will simply damage the fan.

One of the reasons is that electric motors can also act as electric generators if we are the ones who move them (power plants work based on that, turning generators with the force of the wind, water, etc).

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So if we make them rotate, we can cause damage to the electrical circuit of the fan and break it. It is not intended to be a generator!

Don’t Forget the Aluminum Heatsinks and Grilles

Once you’ve cleaned the fan, you’ve got rid of one of the big dust collection points on laptops. However, he is not the only one, far from it.

There are basically two other critical points that can fill with dust and obstruct the air outlet, preventing proper cooling:

01 – There is usually a plastic grill just below the fan you just cleaned, on the laptop’s case. Check that no dust has accumulated there, and clean it.

02 – The most important case, without a doubt, is that of the side vents through which the air enters the laptop. In them, there are usually aluminum heatsinks with fins close together, where the accumulation of dust is as simple as it is catastrophic.

Without those clean intakes, the fan will never get enough air to cool your computer, so take care to clean them thoroughly.

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Of course, check the rest of the interior of the equipment and clean it of dust, very carefully in the electronic parts to avoid an electrostatic part that damages the laptop. The crucial thing is to keep the vents clean.

Does the Thermal Paste also have to be Cleaned

After cleaning your laptop’s fan and aluminum heatsinks, there may still be one more step needed to get your computer back to normal temperatures.

On the CPU there is a compound called thermal paste that serves to facilitate the exchange of heat between the surface of the processor and that of the cooling system.

Well, thermal paste doesn’t last forever, and at some point it dries out and loses much of its effectiveness. If your computer has several years of use, it is best to replace the thermal paste.

The downside is that this is a somewhat complicated process (and one that requires you to buy thermal paste), so if you don’t want to do this it shouldn’t be a problem:

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01 – The first thing is to get the thermal paste. It is crucial that it is a non-conductive paste of electricity, especially if you are an inexperienced user, because this way you will avoid problems and short circuits. Above we leave you one of the best quality.

02 – You have to remove the entire cooling system from the laptop. To do this, unscrew the CPU (and GPU) very carefully, and any other screws that have the copper “heat pipe” on which it sits.

This heat pipe emanates from the fan, so it’s easy to identify, and follows a “path” to the CPU/GPU.

03 – Once removed, and you see the processor and/or graphics card exposed, you have to clean the thermal paste that it already has. Isopropyl alcohol is best, but 96º alcohol or an electronics-specific alcohol wipe should do the trick.

04 – Now apply the new thermal paste, you can just put a small dot in the center of the chip, or spread it out. Do it exactly on the highest surface of the processor, which is where it makes contact, don’t do it on the whole chip because it doesn’t make any sense. In other words, it replaces the paste where it already is.

Obviously, this process may seem somewhat complicated, explaining it “lightly”, so if you have any doubts, you can leave us a comment below.

In any case, remember that changing the thermal paste is not a “mandatory” process and that it usually only influences the temperature by a few degrees. But, if after cleaning the fan you still have cooling problems, it may be the only alternative.

We hope you liked our article, and that it was helpful for you to clean your laptop fan. As always, do not hesitate to leave us your comments below if you have any questions or concerns.