Latitude E6500 overheat solution

Hello,

I have a latitude E6500 and recently started having problems with overheating, including over-temp shutdown's by the BIOS

I tried the newest BIOS (A29), blowing out the dust, etc etc.

I upgraded to windows 10,  and to help me decide whether to keep the 6500 or an HP of the same vintage, I ran PassMark's BurnInTest on both.

The HP passed, but the spec's were lower, but the 6500 failed.  Quickly.

I looked at the temperature log, and when the test started it was running 78C on core 1, and 69C on core 2.  Very quickly it ramped up to 92C for core 1 and 78C for core 2.

The test did eventually finish, because the processor didn't quite hit the magic shutdown temperature.  The temp's maxed out at 98C (core1) and 86C (core2).

It seemed odd that the temp's would be so different, so on a lark, I pulled off the heatsink, stripped the thermal paste off the heatsink and processor (carefully... no point in killing 'em) threw on some Arctic Silver I happened to have in the toolbox, reassembled and re-tested.

This time, the core temp's were +/-1C of each other the whole time, slowly ramped up to 84C, at which point the fan kicked in, brought both cores back down to 64-68C, and they never climbed back up.

I thought it was a fluke, so I turned BurnInTest up from 50% duty cycle to 98% duty cycle, and ran it again.  The results were the same; neither core broke 74C.

I can't believe that it was such a small thing to make such a huge difference, but I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

I don't know if this'll help anybody else out, but hopefully those of you (like myself) that just use their laptops for music and netflix and surfing & can't justify springing for a new one, can breathe some new life into their machine.

~C