After a couple years of intensive use of your mac portable it's a good thing to open it and dust off the internal components with canned air. Dust accumulation on electronics can lead to overheating issues specially if you use the portable in a dusty environment or if you have a cat/dog. Since the fan unit is not an expensive part you can also replace it with a new one or drop a tear of sewing machine oil under the seal at the top of the fan. To complete the job you can also remove the heatsink and apply fresh thermal paste to the processor. Use a good quality one like the Arctic Silver 5.

Do I have to REMOVE the fan, before cleaning it, or could this be done with a vacuum cleaner?

Since I am also planning to open my MacBook because of needed dust removal I have also a question regarding LCD screen vanishing when on different angles...

To explain: when I adjust the angle, some angles give only blackish LCD light - it looks like it would loose some contact with inverter and LCD or sth?

Thank you in advance.

You can blow compressed air in the back where the heatsink is if you are not willing to take the computer apart, however, this is not as effective as taking it apart, but helps if you don't want to or uncomfortable with disassembling computers

This a old question I thought i'd voice my opinion in too

Thanks for your answers, I have decided to open the computer and do a proper dust removal with compressed air. However, this did the trick only for a short period of time. After a month, the Mac is again wants to start flying, despite the fact, I have already change the hard drive and add 2gb RAM. I think this should be working properly, but unfortunately nothing changed, except the few percentage speed enhancement.

Too bad, the computer is not in warranty anymore, because this is becoming a bigger problem in the library more and more.

Check this idea. It's worth checking.

http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2009...