How to clean the fans and replace the thermal paste?

I would probably do the thermal paste if I was already there since it's not an easy job to clean the fans. I usually take them out and deal with the heatsink with full access. OP probably bought a small 256GB one not knowing it's soldered :-(. I see them all the time.

Might as well do it while you're there in a system like this. Won't kill you if you don't have any thermal paste on hand but if you do it makes sense to.

Thanks Dan! Your answer was very helpful however I'm only using 37GB of my 256GB storage, I also recently formatted my laptop.

I think Nick is also right about the thermal paste. I keep reading people commenting about replacing the thermal paste since the laptop was opened. I'm thinking I might do the same as well.

Guys, I hope you'll continue to help me out. I'd like to confirm the tools I would need to be able to open, clean, and replace the thermal paste:

- Essential Electronics Toolkit

- Canned air (or will a dust blower do?)

- Thermal paste (is there any particular brand I should get?)

Disclaimer: I've never tried doing this before so I want to make sure I have all the tools I need :) Thanks!

@rolandc3 - What is your RAM size? While its good to hear you are not using your SSD for storage that heavily. You have a hidden issue here! Virtual RAM and caching! Depending on the app it may require mush more RAM than you physically have! This is when your storage (SSD in this case) is leveraged to make up the difference. Thats why we try to reserve 1/4 to 1/3 of the drive so the SSD is not over stressed.

Here we have an app Chrome which is a pig! So when you have so many tabs open (10 here) and all of the other things you are running you are hitting Virtual RAM very hard!

To be clear I'm not against refreshing the thermal paste, its just not something I recommend on such a new system as the paste should last a good four years, and we have other things to focus on here!

Besides, as someone who has not done anything in a computer before its best to go slow and do easy things first. Popping off the heat sink is not trivial! And if you are not careful you can hurt your system.

As to what you need I do recommend on getting a can of can'ed air as being much more effective than a squeeze duster.

You do need to be careful with thermal paste as some can damage your system and if you are not neat excessive paste can interfere with the chips function.

I recommend for re-pasting:

Arctic Silver ArctiClean

[prodotto collegato mancante o disabilitato: IF179-010]

Again, I would wait on this! Until you've ruled out the other things here.

hey @danj, thank you again for an insightful answer! You're right, I should take it slow and give cleaning a try first.

Btw, My RAM size is 8 GB (2133 MHz LPDDR3). I'll give it a cleaning for now using the tools mentioned.

Cheers and happy holidays!

@rolandc3 - I had figured you where lean on the RAM. Changing your habits is the first action, don't have so much open at the same time.

Even with my 16 GB systems I can hit RAM limits. Working on large deep pixel'ed images working on more than five can run the system off of RAM and into V-RAM in Photoshop.