Laptop problems, maybe someone here has a tip?

[Statyk]

Yo guys and gals. I wanted to drop this in here to see if any of you beauties could give me pointers to what's wrong with my piece of shit laptop.

Besides my mouse possibly dying and randomly disabling at times, my computer does this thing to my cpu where when I play a game, the fans are nice and quiet as normal for about 5-10 minutes. Then RANDOMLY there on out, the fan will spike to possibly 100% speed for a couple seconds. It'll then slowly start to slow back down. Then randomly spike up to max speed again. It gets loud and annoying, but the funny thing? Never once do I experience framedrops when it happens. I did a virus and malware scan and anything was removed and it still does it, so I don't believe it's that.

I'm curious if I should take the challenge and crack it open to clean and re-apply thermal paste onto the components (got it 3 years ago,Ithink my warrantee is up) or possibly do another factory reset in case there WAS some malicious content plaguing my computer. Mind you, this ONLY happens when I play games and there are no hiccups or framedrops. When I'm modeling or browsing the internet, nothing strange happens.

Any ideas? I'm tempted to try cleaning it. I may be fucking up the components. This thing isn't easy to disassemble though... With my mouse taking a dump and now my computer whenever I try playing a game, I'm slowly losing my mind.

[PutraenusAlivius]

I think it depends on the game you're playing. If you're playing a game that's really taking a heavy toll to your CPU, try to measure the memory usage. After that, try quitting and launch lots of programs so that the memory usage is the same or maybe larger.

If the results are the same, this means that there's a line where it will speed up or regular.

[Statyk]

The games that I play regularly are League of Legends, TF2, and recently have wanted to play CS:GO. But due to these problems, I try to avoid CS:GO. That one makes my fans go nuts the most (for obvious reasons compared to TF2 and LoL). It pretty much happens in every game I play.

[Nice]

It might be over heating due to dust building up there or some other reason. Did you check the temperatures?

Also i suggest you're careful when opening a laptop, if you're not experienced I suggest that you do it while looking at a video tutorial. It's harder than it seems.

[Tiger]

I'm going to have to agree with Dogfood here, seems like there's a lot of dust in your cpu fan. You could either open your laptop up and clean more thoroughly, or you could use a can of compressed air(which you would probably want anyway when cleaning it) and spray some into the fan. I don't really recommend the latter, though, since there's a risk that it would only be better temporarily, because the dust would get compacted and come back n bite you in the butt.

[Romulator]

Just while we're talking about fans here;

I have a fan in my laptop, works great and all, but of course, like any other, the laptop still heats up my leg. I got a USB fan underneath it now whenever I use it in my room. Would this USB fan tend to blow dust into my laptop?

[Googolplex]

Reinstall windows.

[Prelauncher]

I had a similar issue with my laptop. When playing games my fan would speed up to its maximum, especially when playng Mount & Blade Warband for some reason... It went so far that my laptop would heat up so much that the game actually crashed, I think I even got a blue screen once. What I did was to open the laptop and clean the fan, there was a huge amount of dust gathered inside the computer. The dust would prevent the air from circulating and my computer tried to solve it by increasing the speed of the fan for cooling but it could not cool the components. After cleaning it my computer worked fine again, infact it was a huge boost for the performance. So yeah, Like Dogfood said, check your temperature.

[Statyk]

Thanks guys, I kinda figured it might be buildup. I'm downloading the Nvidia system monitor now and I'll see what's up in there. Have never opened this baby in 3 years and it can get dusty in here, so it was my first thought. I've looked up maybe 3-4 things on how to disassemble it and it sure won't be easy... But I've opened a 360 before to fix the RRoD so I kinda know what's in store, just a LOT more complicated.

Another thing, I plan on cleaning and replacing the thermal paste on the CPU and possibly GPU (assuming it has it as well). What can be used to remove it cleanly without damaging components? I used to just wipe as much as I could off with Q-tips. I also used ArcticSilver thermal paste for fixing xbox 360s, would it be fine here as well or do I need something better/specific? Is it even necessary?


@googol
I don't think reinstalling windows would help. The software also comes packed automatically with the computer, so I don't have a disk on hand to reinstall. All I'm aware of is resetting the computer to reinstall that. I'll do that as a last resort.

[Tiger]

I think ArcticSilver is going to work fine.