Troubleshooting: When Your PC Doesn’t Boot or Overheats After Cleaning
By Chongchen Saelee
If you’re lucky, you can go maybe a full year or two without cleaning your computer. But you have to be careful. You can’t just on a whim do a complete disassembly and cleaning. You need to have spare parts lying around just in case you break something or need things replaced like dried up thermal paste. So always make sure you have spare parts and supplies around before doing anything.
Anyway, I won’t get into how to clean your computer, but I will get into how to figure out why afterwards your computer won’t boot up or there is a BIOS warning that your CPU is overheating. Check for these:
- Did you apply thermal paste on the CPU surface correctly? You should only apply a very small amount, some say the size of a pea, but I say the size of two grains of rice. Make sure that you are pushing down on the heatsink onto the CPU with balanced pressure so that no air pockets are in connected surfaces. Too much thermal paste could store heat, too little will not displace heat.
- Did you make sure anything you disassembled, you re-assembled correctly? For example, if the cables aren’t plugged in completely, especially the motherboard or CPU’s power cable, then the CPU knows to throttle power or give a warning so that it doesn’t fry itself. If you ignore these symptoms, you’re looking for major malfunction.
- If there is no video output, then make sure your graphics card is properly seated in its slot. Make sure the graphics card’s power cable is connected properly. If you replaced the GPU’s thermal pad or paste, make sure that it has complete contact between the heatsink and GPU chip.
The big no-nos when it comes to handling computer parts:
- Don’t drop anything!
- Don’t discharge any static or electricity on sensitive parts. Not only will you damage the hardware, if you end up electrocuting yourself, your hardware’s not gonna mourn for you.
For the most part, assuming you aren’t grossly incompetent or just plain don’t know what you are doing, then things should go smoothly. You’d have to really want to break your machine for it to not to work anymore. Most of the time when your computer doesn’t work even though previously it did, it’s because of simple human error.
Good luck!