 Hey, today I'm going to be repasting my laptop's thermal paste on its CPU. This is a good idea to do every once in a while, maybe as often as you change your car's oil. Maybe a little less often than that. The stuff you're going to need, the thing that's important is you want some kind of thermal paste. This is what I have. It's Arctic MX2. I got this thing for like $5 years ago, and it's still running for me. There's still plenty in it. You also want some kind of rubbing alcohol. I actually have this green version with winter green and glycerin. You don't need anything like that. You just need rubbing alcohol and something to rub stuff with. You also need, of course, little Phillips head screwdrivers. So let's go ahead and do this. So whenever you open any computer, the most important thing is you want to get rid of the battery first. So I'm going to unlatch this. It has two little latches here. Now if you saw the video I put up a couple days ago on installing an M-SATA drive. That process is going to be pretty similar. There we removed, we had to remove the keyboard and the sort of palm rest. In this video, however, we're going to be removing a little bit more. I want to be clear. So on a ThinkPad, you have these little symbols, this little keyboard, and this little palm rest. You want to unscrew all of those. But we're also going to be unscrewing some other ones, like ones that are just unmarked. And that's because in order to get to the CPU, we're actually going to have to entirely remove the motherboard and flip it over. We'll see what that looks like. You don't have to remove the screws for the RAM covering because that will come off with all of this. But basically everything else you have to remove. So I'm just going to speed through that so you don't have to watch me unscrewing. So now I have all my screws unscrewed except for, again, the RAM covering. I didn't unscrew the hard drive. That's not necessary. And I haven't unscrewed these two screws in the corner. I forget if that is for the hinges or otherwise I'll tell you if you need those. But all the other screws have been removed. So now once you've done that, we want to remove the palm rest and the keyboard. It should be pretty easy if you saw my M-SATA video. Basically you just push the keyboard forward and it will come out of its socket. And then it is attached by this little thing, this little ribbon, and you want to peel it open. It's not attached in any fancy way. It just sort of plugs in. Now this ribbon down here, there's a little, you want to remove it as well. There's a little black latch. You want to sort of make it go up, might need a credit card or something like that. But yeah, you want to force the, I don't have any nails. I'll do this. Okay, yeah, there we go. So once you force that little black latch up, you can freely withdraw this little blue ribbon. And then you can basically take everything off. Now I will say this, especially if you're not using a think pad or something like that. Think pads are made to be easy to take everything apart. But sometimes even if you are using a think pad, this could be a problem. A lot of times these parts will be like taped on or something weird like that. So that is a big annoyance because you're not actually sure. If you feel some resistance, you don't know if that is going to be like a screw you forgot or something else. But anyway, that's just a big pain. Some models of like dels, everything is taped. It's so stupid. Okay, so now here's what we want to do. This whole thing is the motherboard and we want to take the whole thing out. So notice that it has some screws. In my case, they're white screws. We want to get rid of those. We also have the M-SATA drive and the Wi-Fi card. We want to actually remove both of these. So if you saw my video before, you remember how to put in an M-SATA drive. So basically it's attached by screws. Let's actually take these screws off because we need to take off everything that is actually attached to the back side of the laptop. So when you unscrew both Wi-Fi drivers, or the Wi-Fi device and the M-SATA drive, you'll take the screws out. Screws not coming out, but basically what happens is once you do that, the M-SATA drive can be, it sort of will go upwards and you can just pull it out. And the Wi-Fi device is the same way. Notice that it's connected by these two cords that you want to gently pull off. In my case, they're black and gray. And then they're red, and I have red and blue cables. I forget what these are. I think they were originally attached. Like if you have a 3G device for your M-SATA slot, you know, you can remove them there. So I'm going to remove all the screws that I see here, and I'll speed through that so you don't have to see it. Additionally you're going to have little connectors like this. This attaches to the screen. It's similar to this thing we withdrew before where there's a little black latch and you want to get it, you want it to come up basically. And then once you do that, well, this one's like really deep in there, but you can sort of pry it out, okay, it's going to work I swear. I think it is. It's really just hard to do with a camera in your face, okay, yeah, there it comes. And again, you just want to take out every little thing I already sort of undid these screws. You want to take out everything that connects it to the actual, you know, the back lid. I'm going to have trouble with this. This screw is a little stripped before I came here, so I'm going to have to work on that. All right, so I've removed all these white screws here that attach to this plastic covering and you can basically pop that out. Okay, the only tricky part is you see there's several cords that weed through it. You just remove those and you should be able to take this off with only one hand. Okay, there we go, all right. There's another little connector here. I'm going to just again peel the little black latch up. We'll probably do it with this metal instrument that is probably not ideal. You know, a lot of people will be like, you should use credit cards for this. Actually, no, I think I have a card here. Yeah, we'll do that. Okay, so it's my old student ID card. There we go. So that came up. Now we should just be able to pull this thing up. So hard to do things with one hand. All right, there we go. Now this stripped screw on the Wi-Fi adapter I thought was going to ruin my day, but I ended up finding out I could just take these pliers and just sort of move it around slowly. I can't get any screwdriver into it, so this is going to be what I'm doing, but it is actually coming out thankfully. Now I know I said earlier you don't have to remove the hard drive and technically that is true. I am going to go back here and unscrew this thing so I can take the hard drive out. Just because when I pull the motherboard out, it's going to be attached to the hard drive and I'll have to wiggle it a little bit more. So I'll actually remove this as well just to be a little safe. So on ThinkPads, you just have literally one screw. You unscrew that on this little case thing and you can pull them off. And then you can basically just pull the hard drive out. It's nice and simple. Of course, to remove the hard drive, obviously you don't have to take anything else out. You don't have to open anything. It's the easiest thing to take out, which is very nice about ThinkPads. But anyway, once you feel like you have all the screws out, you might just sort of want to pull on it and feel where you have resistance. For example, I have resistance down here. I think I need to take this thing out. It looks like it's something screwed into the motherboard, but it might actually be screwed into something below. So I'm going to move this as well. And just gently don't pull too hard just whenever you feel some kind of resistance, figure out what's going on there. And let's see. OK, so this thing comes off. It's not part of the motherboard, but you have to remove it to remove the motherboard. Let's see if we have any resistance over here. Now, a lot of it is just going to be ports that are plugged in. Notice this thing right here. This looks like it's either plugged in. Yeah, so it's plugged into something on the motherboard. So if you want to remove little plugins like this, you just sort of put some force on them, pull them upwards. Don't do anything fancy. Just pull them up. Actually, it looks like they usually have little handles on the side so you can get a grip. But man, it's hard for me to do that. I'm going to just be really careful. I'm not going to put too much force on this. Just sort of wiggle it out. Don't want to force anything here. OK, there we go. All right, so now this is coming up. Let's see. OK, that comes up. There might be another screw in here. I'm not pulling anything too hard. Let's see. Let's see here. Because really, once you pull the screws out, the only things that will be sort of fit in place are the ports and stuff that are set into some kind of, I guess, a port, you know what I mean. So there's plastic around this, so you've got to be careful. So I'm going to yank on this for a little bit. While I don't think it's necessary, I think I'm actually going to remove this screen. It's screwed in. If you look on the back, there are two little screws on both sides that you can unscrew. I think it'll be easier for me to pull this portion out because basically everything is unscrewed. So for most of this side is so perfectly fit to the plastic fitting that I don't want to just yank it out. So I'm going to take off those screws and remove the lid. Once you take those screws out, the screen will be nice and wobbly. You can basically just pull it out. Be careful with the cords around here. Obviously, they might still be in some kind of plastic thing. You don't want to yank this out. OK, so now that that is out of the way, let's see where the resistance is actually coming from. All right, well, I was poking around looking for what was actually still stuck here. It actually ends up the VGA port on the X220. You need to unscrew these two. They're attached through plastic. So you actually have to remove these as well. I don't even know what you call them. So I have tweezers. I'm just going to try and move these around and unscrew them. This is a big pain. I think I've done this before, but I feel like under the models of ThinkPads you don't have to do this. All right, that's about what they look like when they're unscrewed. And now that I've removed those, I can definitely feel that this thing just came out. So there we go. Now let's actually flip it over. And on the back, let's explain what this stuff is, just in case you don't know. OK, basically the CPU is down there. Now this is RAM. Now the RAM, you actually don't need to open up to change. You can actually just unscrew the thing on the back to get to it. But your CPU is here. This little copper thing, I assume it's copper. It feels like copper, looks like copper. Basically, you have a heat sink that takes the heat of the CPU and transfers it over here to the fan where it can be blown out. OK, so first off I'll go ahead and say, since you have this thing opened, it might have a bunch of dust in it, and it's a good idea to just clean it all up. But the thing we're going to want to do to replace, we want to reveal the CPU. Actually, maybe I'll actually zoom in. I very rarely zoom in, but I'll do it just for this case. You'll see around the CPU, there are four sort of screws here. And as you may guess, what we're going to do with those screws is we're going to unscrew them. So I'm going to unscrew this. I think the proper technique, they say, is to unscrew them gradually, like unscrew one, then unscrew the other a little bit, and then unscrew another a little bit. That might just be a meme. I don't know. So I'm just going to unscrew that, unscrew that. I don't think these screws actually cut. Well, we'll see. I forget. I've definitely repaced the X220 before, but I forget exactly what it was like. I think, yeah. So these screws don't actually come up. Oh, notice that I have some tape here. So I'm going to just very gently remove that tape. So oh, and there's a cord here too. I'm not going to yank that out. I have no reason to yank that out. OK, so now this is what we see. Look at that. So there's basically your CPU, and it has all this nasty stuff here, this kind of crusty stuff. That is the old thermal paste, and we are going to want to remove that. In order to remove that, what you want to do is you want to get your alcohol. So I have my rubbing alcohol, in fact, with all this glycerin and empty sec. It's going to smell good, guys. Hopefully that doesn't make a difference, but I'm going to go ahead and put my little Q-tip, my ear swab, into that. And once you have some of that, you are just going to wipe down. You're going to clear off all of this junk. It's going to clean up very nicely. It doesn't look like it's going to clean up, but it's going to clean up. So I'm just going to rub this on the CPU for a little bit, just clean all the junk off, blow anything off that comes off. And yeah. All right, so now I've removed most of this paste. There's a little residue between, I don't know, these little things on the side. I don't even know what they are, but that's basically good enough. Also, make sure you dry it so I dried up any remaining stuff with your swabs. And of course, so make sure that, oh, you can see my face in the reflection there. That's really weird. But yeah, so just make sure it's not too wet and you also don't have residue of Q-tips or whatever. So also, I'm 95% sure that's the GPU. It actually has a thermal pad kind of thing looking on it. You might be able to put a new pad you could actually put new thermal paste on that. I'm not 100% sure. I'm not going to do it. I'm going to stick with what I know. And here's what I know. Here's what you do. I'm going to put that here. We'll zoom in a little bit. When I find the zoom button, yeah, always the best production quality here. So now you're going to take your thermal paste and there's a lot of debate about how exactly to apply thermal paste, mainly because most people are wrong about it. They think you're supposed to do something fancy or something like that, huh? Yeah, yeah. I had to pull the thing off with my teeth. All you want to do is just put a teensy, tiny little dot in the very middle. That's all you want to do. Come on. It's coming out. Okay. That's probably even too much. I'm not quite sure, but that looks like, shoot. Now it's not exactly in the middle because I had to sort of move it around. Either way, it's basically going to work. Don't spread it around yourself. Don't do anything stupid. I might actually want to take a little bit of that. Well, I don't know. It'll be fine, whatever. But you want to apply, you want to put back on your heat sink directly over it and it's going to squish it down, spread it around, all the stuff you need. So I'm going to put this more or less directly. Sorry, this cord is messing with me over here. I'm going to put it basically right on top and I'm going to screw this in. Again, I'm going to screw gradually. I'm going to make sure that my hands are in the way so you can't literally see anything. Let's see. So I'm going to screw that, screw that. And once you have that done, basically we are finished. We're just going to redo everything we undid. We're going to screw everything back in. So yeah, that's it. As I said before, now is your chance to clean some stuff up. So I have a little dust in here, so I don't know, maybe I'll just sort of clean it up with an ear swab with alcohol on it, stuff like that. Just get it out, make sure, of course you're not just getting it wet, make sure you're actually removing the stuff. But yeah, you might want to go over most of your computer just to make sure there's not junk in it, dust and things like that. That would just be a nice, since it's already open, just go ahead and do that. In the process of taking my computer apart, I actually realized there was a little part that was broken on my, I guess on the case of the laptop. And that is this little thing here, which actually goes, so the power cord goes in here, this little thing that, let's see, this little yellow thing that you plug into. And it's supposed to have this thing on top of it that screws in, but it looks like the whole screw had come out. I actually did not do this myself, it's just when I opened it up, it looked like, I don't know, maybe I had dropped my laptop at some point and this had broken. So I'm actually gonna unscrew, I'm gonna unscrew the screw from this little plastic part. See, there's a metal part that I'm holding and there's a plastic part. And then I'm gonna super glue it back where it belongs, just because I want that little stability just because why not, gotta be careful. While that super glue is drying, I just wanna bring your attention. So down here, this one part we didn't remove, this one mechanical part, as you may be able to guess, if you look on the back side, these are actually the speakers. I have in the past had speakers break on a ThinkPad and these are very easy to replace. You don't, of course, need to take off the motherboard and all the stuff. You actually can just unscrew this, take them out and replace them. You might be able to upgrade your speakers or something like that, but just so you know what parts we're looking at, that's that. Be extra careful as you put everything back in to make sure you plug everything back in. So for example, this speaker of course is going to go in this little thing that we took it out of, our screen, of course. This cord is gonna plug back in to where we removed it before, as is this one on the other side. And these cords here that come from the screen, in case it wasn't clear, these are usually antennas. The gray and the black one were put in the Wi-Fi adapter. So you wanna have them rope through as before to the Wi-Fi adapter. And of course, in case you already forgot, there are little trails for them so they don't have to hit anything else. Let's see, there's one also in this thing, right? So they can weave through. So just be mindful to put everything back more or less where you found it. All right, so that's about it. I screwed everything back in. Just make sure you put things in in the right order. That's the important thing. So replacing your thermal paste is actually something you should do semi-regularly. I think I said you should basically do it as often as you change your car's oil, probably a little less. You don't really need to do it that much if you just have a machine you're just using. I mean, it's not like a gaming rig. But yeah, it's just a good idea. It will possibly, it'll probably make your computer run silencer, and it'll of course be less hot. And you actually might get some good performance gains as well just because, well, it's complicated how they work, but if you're running too hot, your operating system might be doing weird stuff just to sort of make it go a little slower or like you're not using. Anyway, just do it. Something you should know to do. All you really need is this. I did use some other tools, but yeah. All right, see you guys next time.