Meltdown Averted

I finally got around to replacing the thermal paste on my 11 year old MacBook Pro. Somewhat surprisingly, the original paste wasn’t entirely dried out, which seems kinda amazing considering the wear and tear on the device and its time in the blazing Arizona desert for half of its life.

The install process was pretty straight forward:

• Take off the bottom of the laptop.
• Disconnect the battery
• Remove a bumper on top of fan output.
• Remove a few bumpers on top of screws that hold heat sync on top of CPU.
• Remove 5 screws that hold the heat sync and pipe over to the heat exchanger.
• Clean up the old thermal paste on CPU and heat sync with isopropyl alcohol.
• Install new thermal paste.
• Use some canned air to blow out any thermal paste bits left behind and clear out the cooling fan and heat exchanger.
• Reverse the earlier steps to put things back together.

That all went according to plan, but the first time I put it back together, I didn’t fully seat the battery connector. So, I tried to power up and nothing. My heart attack ensued. Took the bottom off again, snapped in the battery connector fully. Bottom back on and boot happened as expected.

Results? The system seems to be running somewhat cooler. The fan doesn’t kick in a few seconds into every YouTube video play; now it’ll go 10 minutes or so before the fan starts spinning at low speed. This is a definite improvement over immediately kicking the fan on at high speed.

So, for $5 and 20 minutes of turning screws, I’ll call it a win. My ancient Mac lives to fight another day.