~frostbain

Some of you may remember that somewhat recently, Dell had a few lawsuits and recalls due to heating issues; including an automatic extension of warranties for everyone with particular models.

Well, mine was one of those models, but I had already had the motherboard and whatnot replaced (although not the actual heat sink unit) - so I didn't send mine in.

I've got some projects coming up that require the use of my laptop - since school computers may not have the required software - and my laptop has been acting up again. It's been frequently shutting down due to temperatures being too high and all that fun stuff.
I realized what the problem was on my own (dust and ventilation causes lots of problems for my computers), so I semi-quickly disassembled the entire thing. And I mean, the monitor was hanging on by one unplugged cord type disassembled. Pulled the heat sink/fan unit off the processor, unplugged the whole assembly; and cleaned out the fan. Also applied some new thermal paste, since the stuff that was on there originally was basically stone.

I've now been running a German made fan and temperature control program for about 5 minutes; told it to manually turn the fan on it's highest setting... The CPU temperature has dropped by, quite literally, 20C (it's actually 10C lower than the hard drive). It's the coldest any of my computers have ever run.
So, if you have one of the units affected by the problem (in my case, an Inspiron 5150), I'd suggest the fan/temp control software, which can be found here: [link]
The site is in German, and it only works with certain units (listed at the bottom of the site); but it's pretty awesome so far.