A "Normal" persons dissasembly of a g74sx

[kaltoreth]

Ohoi!

So, lately - I've noticed that my average heat while playing have been almost 10 degrees higher than it was when i bought my g74sx approx 6 months ago. So I decided to disassemble it completely and see just how much dust the famous spot between my fans, and my "radiator" had accumulated - And i have to admit - I was astonished about how much "sticky" dust had gotten there.

If you know your computers, you also know that static dust is "sticky".

I want to note that i use compressed air cans quite often to blow as well as i can from the stupidly small options given to me, to get rid of dust - and I did NOT expect to find as much inside as I did. Considering I've only had it aprox 6 months. And the fact that I had to dissasemble my laptop in such a way, just to get to the fans, is so badly designed i wanna make a hole in my wall with my forehead.. Anyways .. Here goes..


About to dissasemble my Asus g74sx. To remove dust from the fans, inside, and the cooling tract
http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g157/utepils/Asus%20g74%20disasembly%20to%20remove%20dust/20120505...

Beer for motivation 😃
http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g157/utepils/Asus%20g74%20disasembly%20to%20remove%20dust/20120505...

Removed the top lid. As you can see, after just 6 month, its gotten covered with dust. Inside computers, dust tends to get "greasy" and stick .
http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g157/utepils/Asus%20g74%20disasembly%20to%20remove%20dust/20120505...


MOAR BLITZ! Tho, tring to show that dust even sitts on the speakers haha
http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g157/utepils/Asus%20g74%20disasembly%20to%20remove%20dust/20120505...

OVerview of fans. I took them off the case and thoroughly cleasned the "rills" or whatever its called in enlglish. So that no sticky dust would make it harder for fans to move 360 degrees more freely-
http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g157/utepils/Asus%20g74%20disasembly%20to%20remove%20dust/20120505...


better pic of where the fans meet the heat sink. Ouf ... Took me a while to peel through it front to end, as its about 2cm "deep" And every reel was cleaned. Its now 100% blowthrough
http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g157/utepils/Asus%20g74%20disasembly%20to%20remove%20dust/20120505...

Clean 😃 You can also see where the heat sinks get theire heat. From the 560M 3gb GPU, and the i7 2630QM CPU.
http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g157/utepils/Asus%20g74%20disasembly%20to%20remove%20dust/20120505...

Almost back together. 😃
http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g157/utepils/Asus%20g74%20disasembly%20to%20remove%20dust/20120505...

And as it should be .. Screw leftovers haha 😃 Quite alot aswell haha
http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g157/utepils/Asus%20g74%20disasembly%20to%20remove%20dust/20120505...


I choose not to put image directly into the post, as theire high resolution, and i find a quick description above a link to be better for this.

I hope you guys got something usefull out of my post.

CHeers 😃

[fostert]

+rep @kaltoreth! Nice to see this and to see G74 users post common but uncommonly difficult maintenance tasks like this. We're all gonna need to do 'em soon enough.

What would you suggest to do to keep the dust from accumulating inside at the heatsink fins? Do you blow compressed air in through the back, or try to squeeze the little nozzle into the intakes under the screen? WOuld love to hear your opinion and thinigs you've learned.

[kaltoreth]

Thank you 😃 Glad to see someone had some use for this.

I made this thread, since so many "experts" do it, so i made pics from a not so expert at dismantling laptops. I do work alot around computers, but my field of expertice is VmWare administration, SAN, Cisco programming and such, so my skills with taking stuff apart is fairly limited when it comes to laptops 😃

[RuloSuper]

Could you check the links, they were not working for me.
Thanks for taking the time of documenting the whole process.

[ConspiracyHeist]

kaltoreth wrote:
Thank you 😃 Glad to see someone had some use for this.

I made this thread, since so many "experts" do it, so i made pics from a not so expert at dismantling laptops. I do work alot around computers, but my field of expertice is VmWare administration, SAN, Cisco programming and such, so my skills with taking stuff apart is fairly limited when it comes to laptops 😃

Did everything work as smoothly as before? I have had my laptop for close to 6 months now and I have almost obsessively been spraying air into it every other day since, but I know that I too will have to take this beast apart and clean it like you but I'am really dreading that day. My ultimate question for you is was it harder taking it apart or putting it back together? And do you have any suggestion for a relatively noob person on this operation. All I know is this is "My Precious" and I dont want to drop it into a volcanoe if you know what I mean!
Thanks for your post Kaltoreth.

[HP-X]

Regarding the dust inside the computer. I disassembled my G74 first after ~8 months or so and I didn't really have the fine dust. I did find two dust bunnies though (R.I.P.)! My tip is to detach the monitor once every two months and just vacuum the vents below it in order to keep some dust out (and push the disassembly forward). I still had dust on the MB as you will see.

I took a few pics when opening up although none after removing the motherboard. Only did that in order to clean out the radiator and fans (without pushing dust below MB).

My pics show the cable connectors and the hdd serial!

Antenna + speaker connector (lousy...... LOUSY picture). Red cable towards the antenna connectors iirc.
http://www.mediafire.com/conv/28de7e45b09713433e16d13b43f4afef86374c7f96a880d1dabf29cd751e474a6g.jpg

Lifting of the keyboard showing all the ribbon connectors running from the keyboard to the motherboard.
Note: The locks for the ribbons are just "flipped" upwards.
http://www.mediafire.com/conv/316a104e1b74d5fe1fc5dfe1b1e98d316b6d3207d2414135552c829bb616794a6g.jpg

Cables connected to the mobo + ribbon cable connectors marked:
http://www.mediafire.com/conv/a6b88e96004044e72075af9bf025280b49a7d31d604fd1c68a94524e9df9daff6g.jpg

And finally the dust pic! 😛
http://www.mediafire.com/conv/23c31c0b5ec06b32391af7b8378efc424f6167f7238e8df1c1d3f76fd737849d6g.jpg

fostert wrote:
+rep @kaltoreth! Nice to see this and to see G74 users post common but uncommonly difficult maintenance tasks like this. We're all gonna need to do 'em soon enough.

What would you suggest to do to keep the dust from accumulating inside at the heatsink fins? Do you blow compressed air in through the back, or try to squeeze the little nozzle into the intakes under the screen? WOuld love to hear your opinion and thinigs you've learned.

I know this question was not directed to me, but I'll throw my five cents in anyway!

To begin with, you can do as I suggested in my post, removing the monitor once awhile and vacuum it. I strongly advise NOT to use compressed air to blow in the vents as this would just gather inside the fans and / or behind the radiator.

I read that someone removed the Blu-Ray and blew with compressed air that way. I myself have not yet tried this or checked how the airflow would actually behave when doing this. In any case it can hardly be as bad as blowing inwards through the vents behind. 🙂

If you look at this pic from kaltoreth you can easily vacuum there after lifting off the monitor.
http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g157/utepils/Asus%20g74%20disasembly%20to%20remove%20dust/20120505...

BTO has a guide on how to disassemble the entire thing here: http://btoforums.com/showpost.php?p=18112&postcount=4

If you just want to remove the monitor, skip to 2. Remove 27 screws on the bottom case in the BTO guide and remove ONLY the five screws marked in blue, then pry open and remove the last 4 screws under the bracket.

ConspiracyHeist wrote:
Did everything work as smoothly as before? I have had my laptop for close to 6 months now and I have almost obsessively been spraying air into it every other day since, but I know that I too will have to take this beast apart and clean it like you but I'am really dreading that day. My ultimate question for you is was it harder taking it apart or putting it back together? And do you have any suggestion for a relatively noob person on this operation. All I know is this is "My Precious" and I dont want to drop it into a volcanoe if you know what I mean!
Thanks for your post Kaltoreth.

It wasn't hard per say to disassemble, but you might want to be careful. As for opening / closing, Id say opening it up was harder since I after reading the BTO guide over and over again still did not know what it would be like to 100%.

Based on opening mine I would say, run compressed air as soon as you have lifted the keyboard up (with ribbons still attached) to get most of the dust away from the board. Lots of the tape used to hold the cables in place was almost useless due to the dust afterwards. 😞

I'm thinking of making a video showing how to disassembling the machine unless someone else is already working on it.