December 29th: Robotics Duties and Breaking My Laptop

Today was sad.

I got out of bed at 11:30am, which is really, really late. That's pretty much not morning any more, that's lunch time.

Anyways, throughout the day I created practice exercises for the programming sub team of the Robotics team to complete. I am almost done right now, I just have a couple more to plan and create.

I repasted the thermal paste for a laptop I found in the dumpster. The problem with that laptop is that the battery doesn't work, but hopefully I can repurpose it for something better. I used that laptop as practice for my personal laptop, because my personal laptop's battery life sucks, but hopefully by repasting it, the fans don't need to run as much, so the battery life improves.

I did a stress test on the CPU before I began repasting. The temperature instantly climbed until a maximum temperature of 93 degrees, to which I promptly shut off the computer so that it wouldn't get any hotter.

I got all the way down to the CPU and I redid the thermal paste. I also took off the fan so I could get rid of the dust that had been stuck inside there. However, I was using a strong vacuum, and I was used to desktop fans being able to withstand the high speeds as a result of the vacuum. However, for the small laptop fan, when I used the vacuum directly on the fan, it literally just exploded. In an instant, all of the blades of the fan went everywhere.

I am devastated. I started looking on eBay if anyone was selling replacement fans, and there are many, which I am grateful for. I wanted to instantly buy it, but unfortunately, eBay doesn't accept visa gift cards, only their own gift cards, so I'll be buying an eBay giftcard tomorrow.

I tried to see if the fan would still work despite it having no fins, and it didn't. What was stupid of me to do was to try to stress test it, which caused the laptop to completely shut down due to the high temperature.

Hopefully I can get my laptop working again soon!

Thanks for reading,
Issac