dont worry ill be sure to sort everything and make a small plan on paper before opening it
Get a magnet off of your refrigerator, drop the screws onto that so you don't lose them.
You'll need a small screwdriver (usually Phillips head)... if you drag the screwdriver across the refrigerator magnet a few dozen times, it'll magnetize, which makes extracting the screws easier... they don't immediately fall off the end of the screwdriver, so you can unscrew and transport the screws over to the refrigerator magnet without having to use your fingers to hold them (that's when I always lose them).
Here's what I use:
That's a tactical flashlight with a very powerful magnet... so powerful that the screwdriver stands upright on its own.
If you have spinning-rust drives (rather than SSD drives), keep the magnet away from the drive. The weak magnetization of the screwdriver shouldn't be enough to affect the drive, but a proper magnet definitely will.
ok thanks
That's pretty clever, I'll try it next time which should be sometime soon as I haven't cleaned my machines in a while either
turn out the screw my laptop use i dont have a screwdriver for them so this week i will meet up with a friend who will give me the screwdriver and ill clean it then hopefully the laptop doesnt explode by then
Do you know how much swap space you have allocated; and how much physical RAM? Thermal paste if you can, for sure. I need to do that with some stuff myself..
If you're going to re-paste the CPU and GPU:
Use the white 'magic eraser' sponges used for scrubbing dishes to remove the old paste... no need to put any liquid on the sponge, they are very abrasive and a few wipes will get up all the old paste.
Use diamond-based thermal paste... even if it dries out, it doesn't matter, as it's the diamonds that are transferring the energy from the chip to the heat sink. Diamonds have amazingly high heat transfer capacity. The paste itself is just a carrier for the diamonds so they stick. Spread it out as thin as you can get it... the thinner the better (it's just there to fill in the asperities between heat sink and chip... ideally you'd want 100% metal-to-metal contact, but you'll never get that unless you very carefully lap the surfaces), then put your heat sink down onto the chip, press lightly while rotating 360 degrees one direction, then 360 degrees the other direction, then tighten the heat sink screws evenly. It won't take a lot of torque (and too much can break your chip)... basically, if you can no longer get the heat sink to move when you twist it, it's good. Then use a Q-tip to wipe up any excess paste that's squished out, so it doesn't short things out.
ok thank you
My laptop used to randomly shut down but I fixed it by using a different charger, since the problem was that the charger wasn't properly charging the battery and so it probably didn't have enough energy to properly use the fans
You could try and see if using a different and newer charger solves the problem. Also, does it also overheat and shut down while the charger is plugged in or only when it's working with the battery? If it never happened while using the charger, then that makes it more likely that the problem is the charger