How to Clean Laptop Fan—The Fan May Be in 5 Different Locations

As we all know, cooling fans are used to cool down processors, GPUs, and other internal component, preventing your computer from overheating. However, if you’ve had your laptop for a year or two, it may be full of dust.

Dust clogs fans, vents, and heat sinks, preventing your PC from cooling down properly. This may cause hardware damage to your computer and may reduce PC performance and drain your battery. In this case, you may need to clean your laptop’s cooling fan.

Cooling Fan’s Location in Laptop

As we all know, cleaning the cooling fan is always related to disassembling laptop. But, the difficulty degree of removing the cooling fan varies from computer to computer, depending on the location of the fan.

Place 1. The Fan Is in an Expansion Slot

If your laptop has a separate expansion compartment for the cooling fan, then congratulations, your notebook is the type with the least difficulty in dust removal. In most cases, you just need to unscrew 2 to 3 screws to remove the cover of the expansion slot. Then, you can clean dust from the fan and apply silicone grease.

Place 2. The Fan Is under the Bottom Panel

If your laptop is in this case, you need to remove all screws on the bottom to remove the bottom cover. Then, you can see the fan and clean dust from it.

Place 3. The Fan Is under a Bracket

The Dell Travel Box 7000-15 and Lenovo Rescue gaming laptops are in such a case. They adopt the structure above, but when we remove the bottom cover, we can only remove the dust and debris in the fan blades and heat dissipation fins.

If you want to smear silicone grease, you need to remove the bracket covering the upper layer of the heat pipe to strengthen the support strength.

Place 4. The Fan Is on the Palm Rest Side

If your laptop provides an expansion compartment on the back cover, but you can only see the hard disk, memory and other hardware when you remove the bottom cover, then your notebook is one of the most difficult to remove.

The disassembly of this type of notebook needs to start from the C side (the side of the palm rest where the keyboard is located). After unscrewing all the screws on the bottom, you need to use a tool to remove the palm rest.

In the process, it is necessary to avoid injury to the buckle and keyboard cable. Therefore, the difficulty of disassembly is relatively high.

When you remove the palm rest, you can clean dust from the cooling fan. But if you want to reapply silicone grease, you still need to continue deep disassembly: unscrew all the screws that fix the PCB motherboard, unplug all cables, remove the PCB motherboard and turn it over. You can see the heat pipe and heat sink there.

Place 5. The Fan Is Blocked by the PCB Motherboard 

If your laptop is like the above situation, but after removing the C side, you find that the fan is blocked by the PCB main board, unfortunately, your notebook is the most difficult to remove. It requires deep disassembly whether it is dusting or applying silicone grease.

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How to Clean Laptop Fan?

After knowing about the fan’s location, you should know how to clean laptop fan. For those how ask how to clean dust from PC, cleaning the cooling fan could also be one of the most important step.

Here is the guide on how to clean laptop fan:

Step 1: Back up important files first, in case the laptop disassembly will damage data or even the computer hardware.

Step 2: Prepare tools, including a brush, a Philips-head screwdriver, a leather blower, thermal grease, etc.

Step 3: Disassemble the laptop to find the cooling fan. If you just want to clean the fan, you can use tools to clean the dust without removing the fan. But if you want to smear the silicon grease, you should remove the fan and the heat pipe.

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