Shadwrick Vick - Lessons and Hobbies » 2005

Archive for July, 2005

Jul 07 2005

Overheating M5312

How does one clean the notebooks vents on the Emachine M5312?

So I bought an M5312 a while back and after about 6 months noticed it’s performance was lagging when encoding movie files, working in several applications (like Illustrator, Fireworks and Dreamweaver MX) at the same time. I read around and sure enough I found out that one of the drawbacks of the Emachines 5312 is an engineering flaw. The techs who created this awesome desktop replacement forgot to make enough holes for the heat to vent. In addition, the vents they did incorporate get clogged fairly quickly after enough use. Since I use my Emachines practically 24/7 (no kidding here sometimes over 18 hours straight) I’m one of those users that feels the heat. I will also admit the 5312 runs hot. You will notice that it runs cooler on battery then when plugged in. Weird I know but true. You can be running somewhat quietly and then you plug in the AC power and boom the fan starts running.

I’m a huge Emachines fan though. I just bought another the M6811 of which I’ll write a review when I get time. This article is simply to address the overheat problems of the 5312. Ok - so I’m not complaining about the machine. It rocks. What value!! The only issue I have is with the heat - but I’m not complaining since you couldn’t find anything close to this notebook for the price.

So I read around and found that you can pretty much clean the laptop yourself without too much effort. Once cleaned, the computer runs much cooler and can process more for longer without automatically turning off. This was my biggest qualm as I was trying to encode video. I even put the Emachine outside in the Utah cold winter to get it to finish encoding once - yes it worked. You shouldn’t have to do this and with the new M6811 I never have overheat problems. I’m writing this with my 6811 now in my living room while watching “Leave it to Beaver”…ah the beauties of wireless.

So you’re overheating and you need to finish your work without the emachine 5312 turning off every 1/2 hour. Worse you loose some work!! ouch. So here are some pictures and tips to get the dust out of the vents. DISCLAIMER: if you screw up your laptop, void any warranties, or do anything to your Emachines laptop or any other for that matter - you do so at your own risk. I’m not telling you to do this. I’m just telling you that it worked for me. You could break your laptop or short the circuit board. It’ not my problem… sigh.

Next I’ll show you how to upgrade the EMachines 5312 to 1GB of RAM. And yes - this will void the warranty.

Ok here we go.


First turn the notbook over & remove the two screws at the top between the two rounded rectangles and outside the rectangle.	Turn over and stick something softly in plastic fram above keys and lift plastic piece upand out. Just sort of wiggle carefully and it comes loose.	The plastic now removed, remove the 3 small silver screws to loosen keyboard.

Now carefully turn the keyboard backwords with cables still attached. Place nicely upside down as shown.	Now you see one of the fans. Remove the 3 little black screws and lift off. Careful here not to touch anything with the screwdriver and anything magnetic could screw up components like HDD.	The fan now removed. Leave cables in place.

The Again Fan close up.	You see how dang dirty my vent is. Take a good look. Take your own pictures for memory sake…although you will be doing this every 2 months or so for a heavy user like me.	Now take a computer dust cannister and blow all that dust out. While you’re at it blow any other holes out like the USB, firewire, PCMCIA etc. Get all that dust out of there.

Now look how clean that is.	Yes feels good. Your computer and you have just bonded.	A picture of my Emachines 5312 outside in cold Utah winter air about 10 degrees while encoding a 1.7GB video file down to mere megabytes for online viewing.