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Clean Dust from Inside MacBook, fan?

Lately, my black MacBook (mid 2007) has been heating up a lot, fan spinning at 6000rpm, some components at 82º. Computer starts getting sluggish, even though I maxed it out to 3GB RAM. I figure I should clean the insides for dust, esp. the fan.

Tried looking through ifixit guides, and couldn't find anything substantial (I'm looking to clean the dust out, not replace the fan). Should I just buy compressed air and shoot air through the vents under the screen? Or should I take apart the computer? How hard is that to do, and how far do I need to go?

Thanks

Answered! View the answer I have this problem too

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Whenever I come across an overheating computer I do two things:

1. Take the heatsink off and replace the thermal compound on all the chips. The compound transfers heat from the chips to the heatsink which then can be blown out of the computer. This paste can dry up after time and overheat the chips. After replacing the thermal paste on my MacBook Pro my average CPU temperature dropped 20 degrees Celsius and the fans dropped down 3000 rpm while watching videos. I would buy some Arctic Silver thermal paste and replace the cheaper standard paste. (guides on iFixit to do both)

2. Remove the fan and clean the dust out of the heatsink fins with compressed air.

Hope this Helps

This guide removes the MacBooks heat sink which will allow you to clean the fins out and there is a link at the end of the guide to show you how to replace the thermal paste.

MacBook Core 2 Duo Heat Sink Replacement

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2 Comments:

This answer would be better if you took the time to find out which machine you are talking about and gave links to the specific guides.

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Sorry, I was going to add guides but my internet was being very slow and I had to give a repaired iPad back to a friend so I left.

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yup..

clean heatsink is the most important thing on your laptop.

although i was dusting off internal parts of my mac, i never cleaned the ribs of heatsink.

i was facing many problems like flickering of the screen, losing wifi connection, overheating... etc....

then i realized, i gotta check the heatsink, so i disassemble it, and there were big chunks of dust built up over the years

now after cleaning, the mac works like new. unbelievable piece of hardware.

here is the pic.

Macbook 2007 heatsink cleaning

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