How To Clean Laptop Vents Without Opening

If you’ve been using your laptop for a year or two, it’s probably covered in dust. Dust clogs fans, vents, and heatsinks, preventing your PC from cooling down properly. You can remove a large amount of this dust, even if you can’t open your laptop. Your laptop’s fan can also run at full capacity, draining your battery. Your laptop may even reduce its performance to stay cool.

If you could open your laptop

Dustproof Pneumatic Duster – 4 PackM Most laptops, especially newer ones, are not designed to be opened by the user. This is a serious problem. On a desktop PC, you have to power off your PC, open the case, blow it out with a can of compressed air, and close the case. You can clean a laptop the same way – if only opening it up and getting inside. Check your laptop’s manual or look online for a special “service manual” for your particular laptop model. Power off the laptop, remove the battery, and remove the panel to get inside the laptop. If a service manual is available for your laptop, it will walk you through the process. Depending on your laptop, opening the control panel may void your warranty.Read more: how to throw a grenade in cs go Once it’s open, take the laptop to a place where you don’t mind getting dusty – like your garage or even outside. Use a can of compressed air to blow air inside your laptop. Make sure you’re blowing dust off the laptop case, not just moving it inside. For example, you can blow more towards the laptop vent so that the dust will be blown through the vent and out of the laptop. Be careful when blowing air into the fans in a laptop – if you make the fans spin too fast, they can be damaged. Blow the fan from different angles, using a short flow of air. Do not use a vacuum cleaner and be extra careful if you choose to use an air compressor instead of a can of compressed air.When done, you can screw back the panel, plug in the battery, and turn the laptop back on. It will run cooler and its fan will spin less often.

If you can’t open your laptop

RELATED: What you need to know about upgrading your laptop’s hardwareWhether you want to upgrade your laptop’s hardware or just get rid of it, manufacturers don’t want you to open most laptops. But dust still accumulates inside the laptop, whether you can open it yourself or not.Read more: how to find xbox ip address once no tv | Top Q&A Even if you can’t open your laptop, you can still try to remove some of that dust. First, take the laptop somewhere you don’t mind getting dusty. You might not want to blow dust all over your desk or bed, so grab a can of compressed air, direct it into your laptop’s cooling vents, and give them a few short bursts of air. With any luck, the jets will knock off some of the dust and it should come out of the laptop’s vents. You won’t get all the dust out of the laptop, but at least it will stop plugging in vents, fans, and whatever else it’s stuck in. This isn’t the ideal way to clean a laptop, but it might be all you can do. If you direct compressed air to the cooling fan inside the vent, you may cause the cooling fan to spin too quickly. Do not direct the air directly at the fan and blow for a long time. Instead, blow the air in short bursts, waiting midway to make sure you don’t spin the fan too fast.If your laptop has a serious overheating problem and you are unable to clean it yourself, you may have to contact the manufacturer for service. If it’s still under warranty, hopefully they’ll help you. Cleaning your laptop regularly is a good idea, but you don’t have to do it too much and do it all the time. How often you need to clean your laptop depends on the laptop itself and how dusty your environment is. Image credit: nick@ on Flickr, Rick Kempel on Flickr, Though on Wikimedia Commons, Cheon Fong Liew on Flickr