hayheather

I was refering to the grey open cell foam on the right side of the picture. It's a little hard to see. Someone else suggested weatherstripping though so I think I might try that

Hello everyone, I'm in the middle of repasting my old laptop in an effort to lower temps. Along the edges of the heatsink there is (was) some of that grey foam to try to make the heatsink more airtight. The moment I touched it, it turned into dust. I'm cleaning it off but I'm wondering if anyone has some good ideas for something to replace it? It would have to be nonconductive, compressible, and have a less horrible adhesive if it is self-adhesive. Thank you! picture of same model heatsink for reference. Notice the horrific foam/dust/goop on the copper fins on the left side of the picture.

More excitement in upgrading my home network. I recently upgraded my old netgear switch to a new TP-Link gigabit switch (TP-LINK TL-SG108). When I added it to my network I started having some ridiculously long timeout issues with wired clients, but not wireless clients. I'm fairly certain it's an issue with the switch (it's the only thing I changed and it's unmanaged). My question is: Is there a way to definitively test that a network switch has decided it doesn't want to be a switch anymore? I understand that if you plug it in and it doesn't work, you know it's broken. I was more wondering if there are any tools or series of somethings so that I can prove to myself and a RMA department that my switch is broken? tl;dr: How do I test a network switch?

I probably will. Seriously though, that's really clever. I never would have thought of it.

So I got a ticket to Arris to ask them about it. Got an email back in under an hour with a number to call. Called got transferred to a supervisor. Turns out that they are super concerned that it could be a fire/injury hazard and told me several times to unplug it and stop using it immediately. They are going to ship me a replacement unit on Monday and emailed me a prepaid return label for me current unit. I even get to keep the included ethernet cord, bonus! I'm really (pleasantly) surprised by their customer service. I mean, I would have been even more excited if their modem couldn't compete with Luke's pizza warmer pc, but that's irrelevant at this point. tl;dr - Issue solved. Arris is sending a replacement, can't keep old modem to warm pizza. Thanks everyone for the helpful suggestions!

That's a great idea, I hadn't thought of that. Thanks

If only. I was thinking about stealing a fan off an old BFG (yes that old) video card and using some of those stick on heatsinks. I just don't want to spend the time/money and then find out it won't help.

Possibly unnecessary story, tl;dr at the bottom I recently purchased a refurbished Arris SBG6700-AC modem/router/wireless ap to replace the comcast one that I've been renting. Installation went fine, it activated, is receiving, everything works. However during extended periods of high traffic it seems to lose it's connection to the internet. Pings to google will time out, tracerts return weird latency and dns probes fail. The last time this happened, on a hunch I decided to take a temp on the box as I thought it was running hotter than it should be. The surface temps of the plastic case were 145F (63C for my Canadian friends). I unplugged it let it set and then plugged it back in and took an idle temp of 110F (43C). My question is: Could the heat be affecting the performance? How hot is to hot for a modem? tl;dr - Modem has intermittent issues. Temping @ 145F(63C) at load, 110F(43C) at idle. Could the heat be causing the issue?