thompson.tyler•7d agoProlific Poster

Found a weird way to get my old laptop running again without buying anything

My Dell from 2014 was taking like 10 minutes just to open Chrome, and I was about to trash it. Then I remembered reading somewhere that you can pop the bottom off and clean the fan with a toothpick and canned air. Did that last Saturday, and now it boots up in under 2 minutes. Has anyone else tried just cleaning the dust out of their old machine instead of giving up on it?

2 comments

2 Comments

christopher_singh926d ago

Completely agree with the original post, dust was a MASSIVE problem on my old Asus. Popped the back off and found a literal dust bunny clogging everything, and after cleaning it the fan actually kicked on for the first time in months. Not saying it fixes everything, but it's a free and easy step that a lot of people skip before spending money.

gracecarr7d ago

I get what you're saying about cleaning the fan helping a bit, but I think it's a stretch to say that's all you need. Ive had old laptops where dust was just one piece of the puzzle. Even after a good cleaning, the hard drive might be the real problem since they slow down a lot after years of use. My old machine still took forever until I swapped the old drive for a cheap SSD, and that made way more difference than any fan cleaning I ever did. You might want to check if your laptop has a mechanical hard drive, because that's usually the bottleneck on a 2014 model.