Rant: People who use thermal paste like it's caulk on a window frame

I opened up a gaming laptop last week from some guy in Portland and found the CPU absolutely drowning in thermal paste. It was squished out over the socket pins and everything. How do you glob on that much paste and think 'yep, that's fine'? Have you ever actually read the tube instructions or just guessed?

3 comments

3 Comments

jesse99421d agoMost Upvoted

A buddy of mine used to work at a little computer repair shop over in Beaverton. He told me about this one time a guy brought in a desktop that was running real hot. They popped the cooler off and there was so much paste it looked like someone had squeezed a whole tube right onto the center, then mashed the heatsink down. It had squirted out all over the motherboard traces and even got into the RAM slots a little bit. My friend said it took them almost an hour just to clean up the mess with alcohol and q-tips before they could even test the CPU. Some people just seem to think that if a little is good, a whole lot must be better.

avery_lopez21d ago

Honestly that "whole tube right onto the center" part is exactly what my buddy's roommate did to his old Alienware, and @the_nina is right about q-tips, we found little white fuzz bits stuck to a capacitor a week later.

the_nina21d ago

Wait, isn't Q-tips bad for cleaning because the cotton can leave fuzz behind on the pins?