My coworker swore by thermal paste reapplication for old laptops, and he was right.

I had this ancient Dell Latitude from like 2015 sitting around that was thermal throttling like crazy. A guy named Mike at my shop kept telling me to just repaste the CPU and it'd be good as new. I thought he was nuts because I figured the fans were just clogged or something. Finally gave in last weekend after I cleaned the fans and it still ran hot. Put some Arctic MX-4 on there and booted it up, temps dropped by like 20 degrees under load. It's actually usable now for basic stuff which is wild. Has anyone else had a simple re-paste save a laptop you were about to trash?

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charlie371mo ago

Dude, that's awesome! I'm genuinely happy it worked out for you, thermal paste is one of those things people just don't think about until it's too late. It's crazy how much difference a tiny dab of paste can make on an old machine.