Gutting a Z61m laptop

Recently I had to gut and clean my laptop.



For about a year now, I have been having trouble keeping my Lenovo Z61m laptop from overheating. It started last springish when I was watching a netflix Watch it now movie. My Laptop squealed a little scream and then abruptly quit. I didn't realize what was happening at first and it scared the pants off me. My laptop is my biggest source of income and is pretty important to me. I had upgraded from an IBM A20m about a year earlier and it was a size able investment for me. It's the cost of doing business, but I didn't make the decision lightly.


So I was pretty elated that it restarted later. But it took me a little while to realize the laptop was overheating. I have had laptops get pretty hot, but I have never had one shutdown on it's own. When I realized what the problem was, I looked around to see how others had dealt with this and to see if it was a common problem with the Z61m model. I didn't find much, but I did find that there is a utility out there called TPfancontrol that allows you to control the fan speed manually. I reprogrammed the fan speed / max component temperature map and that helped for while. But as we got into summer, I had more trouble. I also bought a laptop fan base. The fan base allows better air flow under the laptop and uses three fans to blow air against the bottom of the laptop. In the hottest months of summer, this made the difference between being able to operate my laptop or not.


With those measures, I limped along for long time, but the problem got progressively worse. Last week, it finally got so bad that I bit the bullet and disassembled my laptop. I wasn't able to find much in the way of documentation on how to do it, but it ended up reasonably straight forward. Like most laptops, the keyboard is the key to disassembly. Once the keyboard is off, the innards are exposed.

I was reasonably sure I was going to find a fan blocked with lint or some such. I think those heat exchanger fins were at least 70 - 80% blocked. It is pretty amazing that those copper bars can conduct away heat so effectively. Because of their shape, I wonder if maybe they are filled with a heat conducting fluid.



Now that I have cleaned the heat exchanger, the idle temperature of my laptop has dropped about 10 degrees C. And even during the most demanding tasks (streaming video) it only gets up to 65 C. Previously I couldn't do those tasks at all as the laptop would quickly get up to 100 C and shutdown.

Here is the cleaned heat exchanger:



We are all pleased the operation was a success.

Snowblower repair

That's a new friction wheel on my snow blower. The snow blower has been struggling along with the old friction wheel for the end of last year and the first snowstorm of this year. Considering how worn the old one was, it was doing pretty good.

The friction wheel sits against a spinning plate and that is what delivers power to the wheels. The plate moves in and out to effect a clutch. The friction wheel slides on it's axel. As the friction wheel slides further from the center of the plate, the friction wheel spins faster. This gives the snowblower an infinitely variable transmission. It's a neat and effective even if inherently wearing. The closer the friction wheel is to the center, the smaller the radius it is spinning on, the more the rubber wheel is stressed and eventually torn.

This is the old friction wheel. About a 1/4 inch of rubber is worn off all the way around. It was only sticking out past the metal rim in places. Like I said, I was impressed it did as well as it did. There were little bits of rubber everywhere inside the "transmission" housing. This is the original friction wheel and has lasted since May of 1997. I am not unhappy with it. Simple maintence like this can be rewarding. No manuals involved. Just look at it, take an educated guess and start removing bolts. Stop when it is fixed and reverse. Shade tree mechanics version of lather, rinse and repeat.


This is a 12 or 13 year old 9 horse power 2 stage snowblower sold under the name White. It's really made by MTD, one of the few remaining manufactures of snow blowers. I am really happy that it has lasted as long as it has. It is not a premium machine. But, it saves me a lot of shoveling and means I don't need to do any plowing. It is a great machine for the use I put it to. I don't really have a lot of area to clear. Our driveway has parking for seven cars but is only one car length deep off the narrow town road. We need a path around the barn to the milking shed, over to the goat house, past the woodshed and to the backdoor. The path is probably 300 feet. And the path has to squeezes through gates, past gardens, etc. Bigger equipment would be tough. The tecumseh engine is like new even if the sheet metal looks old. The fact that a little maintenance keeps it going strong is gratifying.

Is it cold in here?

I turned on the heat in the bathroom today. It's starting to get cold in there, and we do bathe the boy in there...

Like a lot of old buildings, we have a kind of cobbled heating system. The main house has a steam radiator system in seven of the rooms. That's the primary system for the cooperative household. I added a heat exchanger to the boiler and there is now baseboard hot water for the back badrooms and the upstairs bath in the main house, also. For the Elle, we have a suspended slab in the bathroom with radiant floor tubing, also off the boiler heat exchanger. The rest of the elle has no heat except when we build a fire in the glenwood cookstove. It actually heats the kitchen nicely and takes the edge off in our living area and bedroom upstairs.

It has been below zero a couple of mornings lately, a little early in the season for that according to me. So, today I turn on the radiant floor in the bathroom. Its really nice to walk in there and be able to stand on a warm floor.