If you’ve had your laptop for a year or two, it may be full of dust. Dust clogs fans, vents, and heat sinks, preventing your PC from cooling down properly. You can remove a good amount of this dust, even if you can’t open your laptop. Dust build-up can prevent a PC from cooling down properly, and that heat can even cause hardware damage. Your laptop’s fans may also run at full blast, draining your battery. Your laptop may even reduce its performance to stay cool. Most laptops, especially newer ones, aren’t designed to be opened by their users. This presents a serious problem. On a desktop PC, you’d power down your PC, open the case, blow it out with a can of compressed air, and close the case. You could dust out a laptop in a similar way– if only there was a way to open it up and get inside. Your laptop may have a bottom panel (or several bottom panels) you can unscrew to access the internals. Check your laptop’s manual, or look up a special “service manual” for your specific model of laptop online.

Power down the laptop, remove the battery, and unscrew the panel to get at the laptop’s insides. If a service manual is available for your laptop, it will walk you through the process. Depending on your laptop, opening the panel may or may not void your warranty. After it’s open, take the laptop somewhere you don’t mind getting dusty — like your garage, or even outside. Use a can of compressed air to blow out the internals of your laptop. portable air purifier cigarette smokeEnsure you’re blowing the dust out of the laptop’s case, not just moving it around inside. panasonic air purifier videoFor example, you could blow more toward your laptop’s vents so the dust would be blasted through the vents and out of the laptop. best odor removing air purifier

Be careful when blowing air at the fans in the laptop — if you make the fans spin too quickly, they could be damaged. Blow at the fans from many different angles, using short blasts of air. We recommend compressed air — also known as canned air — for a reason. Don’t use a vacuum, and be extra careful if you opt to use an air compressor instead of a can of compressed air. When you’re done, you can screw the panel back on, plug in the battery, and power the laptop back on. It’ll run cooler, and its fans should spin up less often. Whether you want to upgrade your laptop’s hardware or just dust it out, manufacturers don’t want you to open most laptops. But dust does build up inside a laptop, whether you can open it yourself or not. Even if you can’t open your laptop, you can still attempt to dislodge some of that dust. First, take the laptop somewhere you don’t mind getting dusty. You probably don’t want to blow dust all over your desk or bed. Get a can of compressed air, point it at the laptop’s cooling vents, and give them a few short bursts of air.

With any luck, the jets of air will knock some of the dust loose and it will escape the laptop’s vents. You won’t get all the dust out of the laptop, but at least it will stop plugging up the vents, fans, and whatever else it’s stuck to. This isn’t the ideal way to dust out a laptop, but it may be all you can do. Exercise caution when doing this. If you aim a blast of compressed air directly at a cooling fan inside a vent, you could cause the cooling fan to spin too quickly. Don’t aim the air directly at the fan and give it a long blast. Instead, blow air in short bursts, waiting in between to ensure you’re not spinning the fan too quickly. If your laptop has serious problems with overheating and you can’t clean it yourself, you may have to contact the manufacturer for service. If it’s still under warranty, they should hopefully help you. If you’ve had your laptop for a year or two, there’s probably some significant dust build-up inside its case. Cleaning your laptop on a regular basis is a good idea, but you don’t need to go overboard and do this all the time.

How often you need to clean your laptop depends on the laptop itself and how dusty your environment is. Image Credit: nick@ on Flickr, Rick Kempel on Flickr, Although on Wikimedia Commons, Cheon Fong Liew on FlickrI saw this on PC Advisor and thought you should see it too. Like PCs, laptops use fans to blow air on components that would otherwise overheat. Typically a laptop will have one or two fans cooling the main processor and graphics chip or chipset. Many designs use a so-called heatpipe system to draw heat away from these components, with a single fan cooling a heatsink which is attached to the heat-pipes. The heatsink will have lots of 'fins' to dissipate the heat, and dust can also build up between these fins, reducing cooling power enormously. What you need to know is that the fans in a laptop are even more critical than in a PC. With everything packed in to make the laptop as slim as possible, there's very little room for airflow. And that means that even small amounts of dirt and dust can hamper a fan's effectiveness.

The first signs of a clogged up fan are random Windows crashes as the system overheats. Or, if the vents are blocked with dust rather than the fan blades, you'll notice the fan running constantly or at a high speed than usual. You can try various techniques, with the easier methods having a lower success rate. If you're not confident using a screwdriver to dismantle your laptop, grab a can of compressed air or try a camera lens air duster if you have one. Vacuum cleaners are not recommended: they're quite ineffective at removing dust and they can also cause a build-up of static electricity which you don't want around a laptop. Obviously make sure the latop is powered off before you start. Insert the nozzle of the air duster into the vents (or as close as you can get it) and start blowing the dust out. Try and stop the fan blades turning using a long plastic object - you'll have a hard time removing dirt from a spinning fan. For those that are happy to wield a screwdriver, turn off the laptop, flip it over, and remove the battery.

If there is one, remove the plastic or metal panel in the base and hopefully it will reveal the fan. Your success here will depend entirely on your laptop model. If you don't see the fan at all, you'll have to go one step further and remove other parts. There are many YouTube videos that show how to take laptops apart: just search for your make and model. Now it's time to blow out the dust, something you might want to do outside. The best way to do this is with a can of compressed air. If using compressed air, press the button in short bursts from lots of different angles. Don't get too close with the nozzle and stop the blades moving as per method 1. You'd do well to unscrew or otherwise remove the fan at this point and check for any other dirt clogging up the heatsink or air vents. After you've blown out all the dust, replace the panel and battery and you should find that the fan runs much quieter when you power the laptop on again. The plastic bearings in laptop fans don't last forever and if your fan is emitting a loud whine (which it didn't when you first got the laptop) it's probably time to replace it.