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A shop lead in Denver told me to stop replacing thermal paste on every old laptop, and he was right
I used to be the guy who would pop open every tired laptop that came in with a heat complaint and go straight for the paste. A shop lead I worked under in Denver, name was Rick, pulled me aside about 6 months into the job and said "you are wasting 40 minutes per ticket chasing a fix that is not there." I got defensive at first because repasting felt like real work, but he had me track it. Out of 15 machines I repasted over 3 weeks, only 2 actually ran cooler under load, and both of those had a fan packed solid with dust. The rest were just old chips doing old chip things, and the customers came back mad anyway because the real problem was a dying drive or 4GB of RAM in a machine running Windows 11. What Rick wanted me to do instead was run a 10 minute stress test and check fan RPM and temps before I ever touched a screwdriver, and if the numbers looked normal I moved on to the actual bottleneck. I still repaste plenty of machines, gaming laptops and stuff that clearly runs hot, I just do not treat it like a default step anymore. So my question for you all is how do you decide when a heat issue is worth opening up versus when you just tell the customer the hardware is old and move on?
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betty_palmer19d ago
Ugh yes, my buddy ran a repair bench in Austin and did the exact same thing for a while. He finally started checking temps and fan speeds first, and turned out most of those "overheating" laptops just needed a good dust blowout or an SSD swap. Saved him a ton of time once he stopped yanking every heatsink he saw.
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