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I have an HP G60 Laptop. It's an old laptop that I got around 2010. It has a Pentium dual-core cpu (2.00 GHz), and 3 GB of memory. It was Windows 7

I resurrected this laptop mid-last year after my other laptop got stolen. Since turning it on again, it made this unbelievably loud whining sound which reminded me of an airplane taking off. Right away I tried blowing some compressed air into the vents, which did nothing to stop the noise. Nonetheless, I assumed it must be the fan and it never went away. As time went on, I was also able to get used to the performance which was bad but not unusable.

The other day I noticed that once again, a lot of dust had accumulated on the vents, so I decided to blow some air into them again, thinking it might increase the performance. After that, when I turned the laptop on, I was amazed that the whining noise was completely gone. It's silent. However, after doing some normal activities on it I realized that the speed is much worse. If you're doing anything remotely resource-intensive, the computer lags tremendously. Music skips and sounds choppy even if the only other thing I'm doing is using a browser. Most video files lag too much to be viewed anymore, etc. The CPU spikes very easily. Throughout all of this lag though, the fan never makes a sound. In the past it would get much louder and start "screaming" whenever doing anything. Now it seems to have stopped doing that, but at the expense of actually being able to do the task.

Even if I can't fix it, I'm so curious to know why blowing out the fans would cause even more lag. I'd love to know what anybody's theory is. I can't really afford a new laptop as you can probably tell. Thanks very much for any help.

Update:

So a few days ago I decided, before opening it up, that I would just blow into the vents again, hoping to shift some of the dust around or something. It seems to have had a positive effect. I blew the compressed air very deep into it and was very thorough. When I first turned the laptop on some dust flew out and it made a pretty scary sound, like the fan was breaking, but after I restarted again it didn't do anything alarming. The laptop is still very quiet, almost silent. But the performance is much better. I might even say it's better than it was originally. Music still skips and is choppy sometimes, but it had always done that. However, watching high quality media and even playing graphically heavy games is now an almost lag-free experience. The computer never gets hot the way it used to. It's definitely back to the way it was, if not even better in some ways.

Thanks again for all your help guys.

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  • You can boost up your laptop's speed with hardware upgrades , Maintaining and Software fixes to speed everything up. For more information, Check this lifehacker.com/5934602/…
    – BDRSuite
    Mar 5, 2015 at 14:38
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    Maybe you broke your fan and it doesn't blow at all and after CPU heats up performance drops...
    – Davidenko
    Mar 5, 2015 at 14:47
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    @Davidenko - If the fan wasn't blowing then the CPU would overheat in under a minute at idle and automatically shutdown. I agree the CPU is throttling itself though.
    – Ramhound
    Mar 5, 2015 at 14:53
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    @Ramhound Don't be so sure. My friend had AMD's apu processor, vent broke down after he cleaned it with vacuum cleaner, CPU was working fine 10-15 minutes but when he tried to watch a movie it went up fast! Amazingly cooler start working again next day :D
    – Davidenko
    Mar 5, 2015 at 14:57
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    You may also want to check (and perhaps renew) the thermal paste/pad between the CPU and heatsink...
    – Kinnectus
    Mar 5, 2015 at 20:53

4 Answers 4

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I'd try disassembling the laptop and visually inspect the fan. It almost sounds like the fan might've gotten stuck after the second time you blew it out. It seems strange that the sound would immediately stop after having compressed air blown on it (unless the fan has physically stopped moving completely).

This would explain why the computer slows down after basic use. It may simply be overheating due to poor/no fan performance.

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  • I figured it would be impossible for the fan to stop completely, otherwise the CPU would have fried already. I'll probably take it apart as you suggested though. Thanks.
    – John
    Mar 5, 2015 at 14:46
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    I very much doubt it would fry...
    – Davidenko
    Mar 5, 2015 at 15:07
  • @John a CPU can't fry. It'll slow down and eventually shut down after it reaches its critical temperature (90°C).
    – user256743
    Mar 5, 2015 at 16:38
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I'd assume instead of cleaning the fan, you further clogged it (mechanically) by blowing INTO the laptop. Thus, the fan isn't able to provide the same cooling performance as it would be when operating on full power. The CPU then throttles itself down to avoid overheating.

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  • The same thought came into my mind.
    – Ayan
    Mar 5, 2015 at 14:50
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I agree with Jacob disassembling seems a good idea. But... What is the remaining free space on disk? This could also be a cause. Did you check if the SIMM(s) are correctly set? Did you get any error message at first start after blowing the air?

If one of the SIMMs isn't correctly set due to the air flow or if the dust has been pushed inside the slot, you may run with the half of memory making your machine swap excessively.

Under Windows Seven you could also check the EventViewer ( %windir%\system32\eventvwr.msc /s ) in which you could find useful information about what goes wrong on your machine.

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  • I have about 80 GB of disk space. It's the same as it was before I blew the vent out. I didn't get any error messages. I had noticed in task manager that it seemed like a lot of memory was being used, but the machine still says I have 3 GB, so I'm not sure. I will check EventViewer as well.
    – John
    Mar 5, 2015 at 14:58
  • Correct answer but highly unlikely; it's almost impossible for dust to interfere with the memory modules while still allowing the machine to boot; usually it would just wreak havoc on the memory bus and the machine won't boot at all.
    – user256743
    Mar 5, 2015 at 16:40
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You fan looks like has stopped working and caused constant throttling due to over heating accumulation of dust. or Something dust particles went inside the hard disk or something(given that all your programs are lagging).

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