What overheating looks like day to day
Modern processors protect themselves by slowing down rather than failing, so the first symptom is usually speed rather than heat. The list below is the familiar progression:
- Fans audible from another room, especially during video calls or games
- Fine at first, then sluggish after ten or fifteen minutes of real work
- Shuts down without warning under load, then restarts perfectly
- The underside is uncomfortably hot to rest on a lap
- Fans spinning hard even with nothing open
- Games that ran smoothly last year now stutter at the same settings
What actually gets done
The heatsink and fan assembly come out, the mat of dust that has formed across the radiator fins is removed properly rather than blown further in, the old paste is cleaned off both the chip and the cold plate, fresh paste goes on, and the thermal pads over the power stages are replaced if they have gone hard. The machine is then run under sustained load and the temperatures logged.
Why compressed air on its own rarely fixes it
Blasting the vents from outside moves some dust and pushes the rest deeper into the fins, and it does nothing at all about paste that has dried out — which on a laptop four or five years old is usually the larger half of the problem. It can buy a few weeks. It is not the same job, and that is worth knowing before spending an afternoon on it.
Desktops and gaming machines
Tower PCs suffer the same way, with the added complication that a graphics card has its own cooler and its own paste, and is often the part actually throttling. Desktops are cleaned throughout, fan curves are set to something sensible rather than either silent or deafening, and airflow through the case is corrected if the fans have been fitted facing the wrong way — which happens more often than you would expect.
What it costs
Cleaning and thermal paste replacement is £45, whether the heatsink comes off after four screws or the whole board has to come out. Diagnostics are free when you bring the machine in, and temperatures are recorded before and after so you can see what the £45 bought.
See the full price list
