Friday, February 16, 2007

I Really Screwed Up


I've been having some slowdown issues with my laptop lately, so I decided to reapply thermal paste to the CPU. I got done applying the thermal paste and started screwing on the heatsink. I tightened each of the four screws incrementally, trying to balance out the tension. I was almost done, but I could still feel the heatsink wiggling. I was tightening the screws a little more when I suddenly felt the #4 screw give way. I felt a sickening sensation come over me. Sure enough, the screw that I was tightening had snapped in two with half the screw embedded in the socket with no possible way of retrieval. There was no way I could get a good contact between the heatsink and the CPU without one of the screws.

Extremely frustrated, I assembled the rest of my laptop and improvised a makeshift solution to put tension on the heatsink involving a small piece of plastic and the keyboard. My laptop booted okay, which was a relief, but I knew something was wrong when the fan immediately kicked into high. I could get the fan back down to low if I pressed down on the keyboard where it covers the heatsink.

Now I'm scared to run any CPU intensive programs. It seems like I may need a new laptop sooner than I thought now.

1 comment:

Kevin Chiu said...

You could try super glue.

Just get a new computer already.