Cooling issues

It's gotten to the point where you could fry an egg over my laptop's hard drive. I'm considering renaming my power settings "Over Easy," "Over Hard," and "Bacon."

It all started when... well, it all started when I bought my laptop five years ago, but this isn't that kind of story. (Anyway, if the moral of this story is that HP laptops have a five-year life cycle, I really want to punch someone.) So let's say it started when the fans of my laptop cooler died, and soon thereafter I developed an urge to play Guild Wars 2. In the fullness of time my money was gone, and GW2 was on my computer.

Now, back in the day, my laptop would overheat playing the original Guild Wars if I wasn't conscientious about propping it up properly, so it seemed reasonable that the sequel might run hot, too. Additionally, I recalled that I had never, in the machine's five-year life, removed any dust from it. Now that I look into laptop maintenance, I find that going five years without cleaning your laptop is like going five years without cleaning your baby, if dirty toddlers caught fire. (They don't, right?)

I went to the internet and found people with similar problems being advised to blow compressed air into the vents in their laptop to get the dust out, so I did that.

Perhaps the impertinently directed blasts of cold air angered the fire elemental which animates my laptop. (They have those, right?) Anyway, things got hotter instead of getting colder.

I revisited the advice I found on the internet, and found other people issuing dire warnings to never just blow air into your laptop at random, you crazy fool. It just makes things worse. So now I know that.

Apparently what you have to do is open your computer up and get at the heat sink assembly and, if you've treated your laptop like I have, remove the rodentlike mass of dust with tweezers. So I unscrewed the panels on the back of my laptop. I found hard drives. I found a battery glued to a circuit board. I had to go back to the internet to figure out how to get at the heat assembly, and what I found, everywhere I looked, was that for my type of laptop, the HP dv6700, in order to access the heat assembly you have to disassemble the laptop entirely and detach everything from everything else. The inner workings of this machine are encased in layers of armor serving no apparent purpose except to keep dust in, and non-HP-employees out.

If my livelihood did not depend entirely on this machine, I might make the attempt. I have spent hours finding instructions for how to do it, with all the different kinds of screws labelled. In the mean time, I am playing Guild Wars 2 while soothing my machine's fevered brow with medical ice packs (and also a new cooling stand). Otherwise, the game just doesn't play.

The other day my laptop opened up a seam and spat out a screw--literally spat, with allowances made for the lack of literal lips. I think my laptop is daring me to crack it open.

As if to inflict empathy with my laptop's plight, on Wednesday I was afflicted with a miserable fever. It took me a while, but through trial and error I discovered that if I got too hot, I threw up--this while my body was shivering, begging me for blankets, mind you. Vomiting at least made the chills go away, but I learned that I could choose between being cold and being ill. So I started applying the ice packs to myself instead of my wretched computer, with similar success--that is, limping but very real success.

Anyway, that got steadily less terrible as the week went on. I have to profusely thank Girlfriend, who dealt with me like a saint no matter how pathetic I got or what I threw up on, and all while suffering through a less violent incarnation of the same disease.

Looking back on this post, I have to say that if you knew about some of the turns of phrase I came up with but didn't use, you would thank me.

Update: Girlfriend's parents are coming to visit today (imminently, in fact), which means someone has to vacuum. Luckily, we bought a vacuum a month ago for just this purpose, after the old one died a slow and ineffectual death--but we hadn't used it until today.

Guess what safety feature our new vacuum cleaner has. Guess. Yes: a thermal shutoff. And to further protect me, the thermal shutoff is on a timer, so the vacuum can't turn back on for 30 minutes, regardless of the temperature.

I don't know why the damn thing shut off after three minutes of use, or again 33 minutes later, but clearly Hoover thinks that I am too dumb to vacuum a carpet without burning my house down.

Good thing I had a broom and a dust pan, because who doesn't like frantically trying to sweep a carpet?