Vent: everyone says swap the thermal paste first, but I check the dust filter every time
I keep seeing techs online tell people to repaste a hot laptop before anything else, and I think that is backwards for most home machines. Back when I started at the shop in 2018, I would pull the heatsink on almost every slow, hot machine that came in, and half the time the temps barely moved after a fresh paste job. Now I open the bottom cover and shine a light at the intake fins first, and on the past 30 or so tune-ups here in Fort Wayne, roughly 20 of them were just packed with pet hair and lint. A quick blast of air and a new $8 fan dropped one guy's idle temp from 78C to 52C without touching the paste at all. Repasting is fine, but it takes way more time and risk than people admit, especially on thin laptops where one slip with a spudger cracks a clip. Do you all clean and test before you go straight to the heatsink, or am I the odd one here?