Computer "support"

Fickle things laptops. Sometimes they can be really easy to take apart and other times they can be completely.....unfriendly. This evening i had the unfortunate luck of coming across one of these unfriendly chaps.

the problem was simple. Laptop continuously shutdown due to over heating.

Now, this is a common problem with laptops as the air that is pulled into the laptop tends to go though thin gaps between the heat sink fins. The dust that goes though these fins gets stuck and bungs the entire thing up. Now normally this is just a simple task of popping the keyboard and removing the heat sink and giving it a good dusting. However in this case the bastard refused to allow me to remove the keyboard until I removed almost every screw from the laptop! Finally after 1/2 an hour of fighting with the 'thing' I managed to pop the keyboard and remove the heat sink revealing about an inch of dust icing. Out comes the hover and I proceed to dust and clean. It was at this point the "customer" decided to press her fingers onto the exposed processor and mistaking the HTC(heat transfer compound) as dust, pushing most of the the HTC off the processor and end up with a large amount of HTC on their fingers. Now without an even amount of HTC the heat cannot efficiently transfer from the processor to the heat sink. I unfortunately do not have any HTC on my so i reassenbled the laptop praying that the bloody thing worked. 20 seconds into starting the machine it hangs.

Restart.

Hangs again.

Restart again.

Hangs again.

Moral of the story: If you think a customer is going to poke what your working on, make sure you poke out their eyes first.