I have a laptop (Dell Latitude D620) that has shown a noticeable decrease in performance over the last few months, and my graphics card just failed on me once or twice, both of which I highly suspect are related to overheating problems. I took it apart (about halfway, anyway, disassembling this model completely is an unbelievable pain) to clean out the fan and dust off the components. There was surprisingly little dust in there, and even after cleaning the laptop still seems to be getting way hotter than it used to, and I can't figure out what else might be the problem. Granted this laptop is on the old side (about 4 years) but I'm poor and going to have to stick with this one until I get a better job. =) On that note I was also thinking of upgrading the RAM, but I'd rather get this cooling problem settled first. I'm totally new to messing around with the physical insides of a computer, so I don't really know what might be the problem or what to do about it. Considering it's a laptop there's not a lot of room in there, so I doubt I'd be able to replace the fan with a better model or anything. Any thoughts or advice? I'd really appreciate it!
Well, since dust is out of the way as a possible cause of overheating, then it's probably that you should change the thermal paste on the video card and the CPU as well (a friend of mine did that and it actually helped a noticeable bit). I found this article, which could nudge you in the right direction.
