Emergency fix for a laptop with bad cooling

I've been given a HP G62 to fix in a real hurry. It needs a system reinstall, but it keeps shutting down due to overheating before I can manage to install Windows. It's always had heat issues and I recommended using one of those fanned stands; that helped for a while, but the problems got worse and now it's basically unusable.

I took it apart and removed the expected plug of compacted dust from the heatsink's fins, but the thick-ish thermal pads on the heatsink crumbled and fell apart. I replaced them with some decent-quality goop, but it turns out the heatsink doesn't press much on the GPU and doesn't press at all on what I assume is the northbridge. Whoever designed this relied on the thermal pads to do most of the heat transfer instead of actual physical contact. Here's a picture of what I saw after I applied the goop, installed the heatsink, screwed it down tight, then removed it to check:


Under normal circumstances I'd consider getting more pad stuff to put in there, but:

1) I feel relying on the pads to do the heat transfer is retarded and would like to do a better job fixing it than HP did making it, and

2) this is a very urgent job. The laptop needs to be ready yesterday, but a) tomorrow is sunday and all the shops are closed, b) even if they weren't I currently live in a tiny town and the best-stocked computer store in a range of about a million miles doesn't even know what anything beyond plain thermal goop is (I tried, believe me), and c) this country has the postal system of a third-world backwater, so any online order would take way too long to get here.

In other words, I have to fix it with what I have around.

The space to fill up isn't very large (I'm more worried about the GPU that kinda-sorta already brushes against the heatsink than about the northbridge which simply needs to touch something that isn't just air), so I'm thinking perhaps a small square of aluminium foil or two with a superthin layer of heatsink goop in between. I'm aware copper would be better, but I don't know where to get a plate of sufficiently narrow thickness.

What do you think? Any ideas?

Get some aluminum bar, cut it to the proper thickness, then use thermal compound on both sides.

Use the goop, then use something external to press the pieces together? Rubber bands? Popsicle/lolly sticks? (Sorry -- can't tell if you're US or UK.)

For the part that doesn't press at all, you might get away with aluminum foil. Be sure to run temperature monitoring software when you put the machine to work to monitor the temps.

hope you already fixed the issue.
but, if all else fail you probably could use a coin.
it would be best if the coin was made of cooper.

you'll need to sand it down (this is the real pain part), but I'm sure it's doable.

wish u luck

The coin would be a good idea, but ours are all copper-plated steel, as soon as you start sanding them the copper goes away (I tried some time ago for a LED application).

I've given up on a quick fix and set up for my user an old laptop from the "don't trust for anything important" pile, which ought to last until I can fix this one. Since I now have more time I'm determined to do a proper fix instead of HP's half-assed method.

I did a test with some blutack and a digital caliper and there's one millimetre of air from the heatsink to the northbridge, and about 0.8mm from it to the video chip. I'm googling for metal stores and will order some copper sheeting in various widths, so I can fabricate proper shims and solve this problem once and for all.

Does anyone here know if HP have gotten their act together in the few years since they made this sorry thing, or are they still this bad? Just so I know whether I should keep everybody I know from buying them.

HP has really high failure rates on all the laptops they have made in the last few years. At least their servers are decent.

NiHaoMike said:

HP has really high failure rates on all the laptops they have made in the last few years

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Why am I not surprised. Ok, I'll tell everybody to steer clear.

I stopped using HP since the last CEO said that $4 billion USD from the PC industry was not enough and he put a stop to all PC production. HP fired him and got a new CEO but she has not been able to rebound fully in the PC market. Our company bought over 150 HP desktop mid-tower PC's from HP about three years ago. The next two years we bought about 400 Dell's in total. The HPs have had a much higher failure rate although its only been about 7%. For us the HDDs from Samsung/Seagate have been junk.

don256us said:

I stopped using HP since the last CEO said that $4 billion USD from the PC industry was not enough and he put a stop to all PC production. HP fired him and got a new CEO but she has not been able to rebound fully in the PC market. Our company bought over 150 HP desktop mid-tower PC's from HP about three years ago. The next two years we bought about 400 Dell's in total. The HPs have had a much higher failure rate although its only been about 7%. For us the HDDs from Samsung/Seagate have been junk.

Click to expand...

+1 to Dell. Especially for Enterprise solutions.

When I was in University, we had computer labs just for engineering majors. There were probably ~200 Dell units in total. Maybe more.
These things rarely failed (I worked for the group that ran the labs) even when being used for 3D CAD and other engineering software for 14+ hours per day each.

I also only buy Dell laptops. My XPS M1730 was amazing, and my Vostro 3450 is great.

I put a large dent in my old Dell laptop keyboard,
breaking the keys in the process. I replaced the
keyboard and it worked fine. I was amazed because
the iron weight that fell on it was heavy (5 lb.s).
It's an old Latitude C610 and still works, even though
the battery is long dead.

Back when I worked at Intel, I had a HP laptop (that was issued to me) break down. When I went to get it fixed, there was a whole pile of broken HPs waiting to go back for service! I also had an Agilent (used to be HP) oscilloscope break down on me. (And it was a scope that was worth about $70,000!) Several others also had HP laptops and Agilent scopes break down on them, and the latter was especially problematic when it got to the point where not even the local Agilent dealer had enough scopes to replace the ones that broke down.