how hard is it to reapply thermal paste on an X60s?

[flyingsherpa]

I've had a used X60s for a few months now and really like it. Being a silence freak, I would like to make it a bit quieter. tpfancontrol is great, but I can't help but wonder if there is a bunch of dust built up in my heatsink and/or if the original thermal paste was poorly applied like I keep hearing about for thinkpads. I'm far from a newbie when it comes to messing with hardware, but most of my experience comes from desktops. I'm just wondering how hard or tricky it is to get to the x60s heatsink and remove / reapply thermal paste. Appreciate any words of wisdom!

[Harryc]

It is a very easy job if you take your time. Refer to the maintenance manual linked below. Be sure to use good quality thermal paste. Arctic Silver is good...Radio Shack.
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... 62866.html

[flyingsherpa]

Great, thanks for the info! I should be able to do that. I think I have some Artic Silver somewhere, but it's probably 4-5 years old so it might be best to get a new tube.

[force]

The only difficulty is that the fan/heatsink module is on the underside of the main system board, meaning you have to pretty much disassemble the entire laptop to get to it.

It's not really that difficult, though. I recommend taking pictures of each step so you know how to route the antenna wires and which places have screws. For the screws themselves, I often sketch the rough positioning of the screws on a sheet of paper with some tape to hold the screws in place.

Use your judgment for which things you need to take out; it's not necessary to remove the modem/AC adapter jack, but you'll need to remove the hard drive card first in order to access a power connector around that area.

Take your time and don't force anything. The HMM is pretty detailed enough to walk you through the process.

[richk]

Old shouldn't be a problem unless it has dried out.

[flyingsherpa]

Thanks for all the advice. I tackled it today and it took a long time but went pretty well. The paste already on there actually didn't look too bad, so I'm not sure it was worth all the effort. I haven't used it enough today to see if it really made a difference. But at the very least I learned a lot about my X60s, so I'm not complaining

[iamdmc]

I'm pretty sure that voids the warranty. The only reason I haven't reapplied the paste is that mine doesn't expire until Oct/2011. I AC5'd my X31 and it dropped temps dramatically. The fan never comes on now and it hardly gets warm to the touch. I couldn't believe it for the first week.

[Harryc]

I'm pretty sure that voids the warranty.

Nah, as long as you don't break anything doing the procedure Lenovo doesn't care. Basically whenever you are inside a warranty machine doing work, the 'you break it you bought it' policy applies.