Archive for the 'tutorial' Category

My experiments with thermal compound on my EeePC

Published at 12:07 am on September 1, 2010 in Deep Thought, Geeky Stuff and tutorial.

I have an EeePC 1000HE. It’s a nice little netbook, but after multiple times of cracking it open to try and fix the fan, the thermal pads got a bit messed up and stopped transferring heat like they should.

The basic design of this laptop is something like this. On the bottom, there is the hard drive and RAM. Above this is a gap — maybe half an inch, I’m not sure — for airflow. The fan is on this level, on the left side. Due to the design, the fan really only moves the heat from the HDD and RAM. Then comes the motherboard, on which the two main heat generating chips are mounted — the CPU and (I presume, not 100% sure) the GPU.

Off the shelf, there are thermal pads attached to these chips. I’d never actually seen one of these before — they’re kinda like foam or rubber, but with apparently good heat conductivity. The heat sink is simply a large piece of metal that runs under the entire keyboard.

Now, back to my problem: my thermal pads had started to get scungy from dust and other floating particles that had accumulated while the laptop was disassembled. I decided to replace the pads with some thermal gel, in this case Arctic Silver 5.

I ordered a kit from Amazon that included two bottles of cleaning solution and 3.5 grams of Arctic Silver. First off, 3.5 grams is even less then it sounds. Second, don’t bother with the ArctiClean stuff; the first bottle is the same stuff as Goo Gone (lemon scented goop remover) and the second bottle was some sort of alcohol mixture. Thirdly, buy locally if possible, otherwise you’ll be paying $2.50 for the compound and $5.00 for Shipping and Handling. Or you may end up paying lots of money anyway because seriously, it’s a fucking ripoff.

I removed the thermal pads (turns out they peel off nicely) and purified the surface of the chips and heat sink with the cleaning solution. Then I applied a super thin layer (following Arctic Silver’s directions) to the chips, put everything back together, and it worked. Sketchily, though — it seemed cooler then before when at rest, but then is spiked past 70C when I did a stress test. I tried playing Diablo 2, and the laptop auto-shutoff after a few minutes due to overheating.

I cleaned the chips and heat sink (though it actually wasn’t marked, which should have raised some questions) and reapplied the compound, this time using a razor blade to get it nice and smooth. Put it back together, same deal. Checked the forums, found a mention of a 1mm gap between the chips and the heat sink. Ah-ha! No wonder the heat sink wasn’t marked — it hadn’t even touched the compound!

I reopened the case, added a good deal more goop to the chips, evened it out best I could, and then played D2 for a few hours. Success! Well sort of. Temps hover around 60C, which is about the same as before, maybe even 1 or 2 degrees higher.

Lesson learned: if it works, don’t fuck with it.

(I was going to post the “don’t fuck with it” flowchart but while looking through my pics folder I found this, which seem rather appropriate.)
drama lamma

Now, for some half-assed ideas on how to make it MOAR BETTAR. First, replace the heat sink with solid gold. Or silver. Or, more reasonably, copper. While you’re at it, modify the heat sink to dip down further toward the chips, so the metal is actually touching the chips. You’d still need some thermal goop, but less, which methinks would be better.

Also, extend the heat sink into the palm rest, which right now is plastic. I believe some Macbooks do this (apparently making them slightly uncomfortable). You could also make the keyboard metal, and figure out some way of effectively radiating heat through the keys. Or, have keyboard rise up at an angle (it’d have to be way sturdier then it is now) so the heat sink is directly exposed to air. Add a dash of awesome by having some small fans that pop of somewhere to blow directly onto the heat sink, and/or have fins rise from the heat sink to add to the available surface area.

BRB, patent office

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How-to: WPA/TKIP on Linux

Published at 6:58 pm on April 14, 2010 in Geeky Stuff and tutorial.

It’s simpler then you think. Yes, it involves wpa_suplicant, but you don’t have to edit any config files or try to decipher the wpa_supplicant command that involves a dozen random, mandatory arguments.

First, install wpa_gui. It should be in your repositories (might have to look under “wpagui” — without the underscore). Run it. If it says something like “could not get status from wpa_supplicant” continue on. Otherwise, awesome! The program is a bit non-standard in it’s interface, but it’s really not as terrible as it may seem. Just hit “scan,” double click the network you want, edit the information with everything needed, then hit “add.” Should connect automatically after that.

To get wpa_suplicant configured right, it’s easiest to install ceni. This is a tool created by the sidux developers as a replacement tool for Network Manager. There’s a deb and source-code in the directory I linked, so it shouldn’t be too hard. Though it was created for a Debian-based distro, I’m confident that it’ll work anywhere. (Note: it’s a curses app — console based, but not command line.)

Once you get it installed, run it. If it freezes your system for ~30 seconds, don’t freak. It does that me, too. Dunno why.

Select your wireless card when prompted, then select reconfigure, then roaming. Then hit the continue (shouldn’t need to change the default options) and… ta-da! wpa_gui should work just fine. ^_^

Any problems/suggestions, feel free to comment.

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