Blade Stealth (2020) Maintenance Advice?

[paulo7702]

So I have daily driven the blade stealth for nearly three years now, and I plan to use it for a while longer. I would really like to replace the battery and clean the fans, and want some advice. Is the battery replacement simple? Will I have to remove the cooling plate that covers the CPU and GPU in order to clean the fans? (I ask because I am really not willing to do that). Where should I buy the battery from? Also, is it better to have a technician do it? I live in London, so if anyone on the forum has some repair shop locations that they trust, I would love those. 

 

I would describe myself as moderately comfortable with opening devices, I have opened quite a few laptops, but to do really simple things like replace a hard drive with an SSD, or add a stick of ram. And this was on super old machines so it was very low stakes repair. 

 

This laptop is like my child, so I am terrified of damaging it, which is why I am asking all of this. 

[DreamCat04]

1 hour ago, paulo7702 said:

So I have daily driven the blade stealth for nearly three years now, and I plan to use it for a while longer. I would really like to replace the battery and clean the fans, and want some advice. Is the battery replacement simple? Will I have to remove the cooling plate that covers the CPU and GPU in order to clean the fans? (I ask because I am really not willing to do that). Where should I buy the battery from? Also, is it better to have a technician do it? I live in London, so if anyone on the forum has some repair shop locations that they trust, I would love those. 

 

I would describe myself as moderately comfortable with opening devices, I have opened quite a few laptops, but to do really simple things like replace a hard drive with an SSD, or add a stick of ram. And this was on super old machines so it was very low stakes repair. 

 

This laptop is like my child, so I am terrified of damaging it, which is why I am asking all of this. 

I recently re-pasted my laptop that I also value much. I was a bit nervous but with all the preparation I did, I was pretty confident. Nothing went wrong and it performs as good as it once did when I got it. I cleaned my fans by just sucking it out with the vacuum cleaner, even though it's said that this causes static electricity but if you're careful and don't use full speed (if you have one whose speed can be regulated), you'll be fiine. But there will still be dust stuck on the fins, which I only saw once I had taken off the cooler to re-paste it (I first cleaned the fans, it improved its temps and performance, but it still wasn't back to how it once was. So I opened it again to re-paste it). If possible, buy the battery from Razer directly, but if not, any other store is very likely fine too as long as the battery is for your laptop. I would first open it, clean the fans, look how much of an improvement it made, if not, a thermal paste replacement might be necessary. I don't know the layout of the razer blade but for my laptop, I have to take the cooler of in order to take the fans out but I could just suck it out without removing the cooler.

 

So short summary of all the above:

1. test performance and temperatures (maybe attach screenshots)

2. open your laptop

3. suck the dust out of your fans

4. put it back together (just not with all the screws so that opening it again won't take as long

5. test again

6. depending on what result you got, either remove the cooler or leave it

7. order and when it arrives, replace the battery

 

Can you maybe, once you have opened it up, attach a picture of the insides?

[paulo7702]

36 minutes ago, DreamCat04 said:

I recently re-pasted my laptop that I also value much. I was a bit nervous but with all the preparation I did, I was pretty confident. Nothing went wrong and it performs as good as it once did when I got it. I cleaned my fans by just sucking it out with the vacuum cleaner, even though it's said that this causes static electricity but if you're careful and don't use full speed (if you have one whose speed can be regulated), you'll be fiine. But there will still be dust stuck on the fins, which I only saw once I had taken off the cooler to re-paste it (I first cleaned the fans, it improved its temps and performance, but it still wasn't back to how it once was. So I opened it again to re-paste it). If possible, buy the battery from Razer directly, but if not, any other store is very likely fine too as long as the battery is for your laptop. I would first open it, clean the fans, look how much of an improvement it made, if not, a thermal paste replacement might be necessary. I don't know the layout of the razer blade but for my laptop, I have to take the cooler of in order to take the fans out but I could just suck it out without removing the cooler.

 

So short summary of all the above:

1. test performance and temperatures (maybe attach screenshots)

2. open your laptop

3. suck the dust out of your fans

4. put it back together (just not with all the screws so that opening it again won't take as long

5. test again

6. depending on what result you got, either remove the cooler or leave it

7. order and when it arrives, replace the battery

 

Can you maybe, once you have opened it up, attach a picture of the insides?

Yeah so I need to buy the bit first, because the bottom of the Razer Blade Steatlh uses one of the torx security bits that I don't have. I can definitely attach pictures once I can actually open it. Is it bad to use compressed air to try to blow the dust out? Or could I use a tooth pick or other small piece of plastic to clean the bigger chunks of dust from between the fins? I found the battery on amazon: the process for that looks very straight forward. The fan cleaning and the risk of somehow damaging the motherboard is what scares me the most. 

[DreamCat04]

4 hours ago, paulo7702 said:

Yeah so I need to buy the bit first, because the bottom of the Razer Blade Steatlh uses one of the torx security bits that I don't have. I can definitely attach pictures once I can actually open it. Is it bad to use compressed air to try to blow the dust out? Or could I use a tooth pick or other small piece of plastic to clean the bigger chunks of dust from between the fins? I found the battery on amazon: the process for that looks very straight forward. The fan cleaning and the risk of somehow damaging the motherboard is what scares me the most. 

If you're careful with your screwdriver you won't mess anything up but I understand your concern. I don't know how much blowing it out will help but I imagine there will be quite a bit that gets pushed towards or into the fins. I would only recommend blowing them out if you have taken them out, otherwise I'd rather suck it out. If you suck the dust out, it will be over really quickly. I only had my vacuum cleaner on for a few seconds for each fan and they turned from grey to black. I don't know if using a toothpick will work because these fins are very small and dense nowadays. You can be slightly careless like I was and just let the airflow from the vacuum cleaner spin the fans but these fans are protected against pumping current into your motherboard. If you want to be extra careful and have it take a bit longer, you can hold your finger on the fan to stop it from spinning. I was also skeptical when I put my cooler back on because I didn't know if I applied even pressure on all the screws but looking at the temperatures, I did, you just have to have a good sense of how much force you applied to each screw. But that's a topic for later

[paulo7702]

On 1/18/2023 at 7:58 PM, DreamCat04 said:

If you're careful with your screwdriver you won't mess anything up but I understand your concern. I don't know how much blowing it out will help but I imagine there will be quite a bit that gets pushed towards or into the fins. I would only recommend blowing them out if you have taken them out, otherwise I'd rather suck it out. If you suck the dust out, it will be over really quickly. I only had my vacuum cleaner on for a few seconds for each fan and they turned from grey to black. I don't know if using a toothpick will work because these fins are very small and dense nowadays. You can be slightly careless like I was and just let the airflow from the vacuum cleaner spin the fans but these fans are protected against pumping current into your motherboard. If you want to be extra careful and have it take a bit longer, you can hold your finger on the fan to stop it from spinning. I was also skeptical when I put my cooler back on because I didn't know if I applied even pressure on all the screws but looking at the temperatures, I did, you just have to have a good sense of how much force you applied to each screw. But that's a topic for later

Thanks for the advice, I just got the battery today and am going to replace that for sure. I'll probably just gently vaccum the fans like you did. It looks like the fans in this unit are actually seperate from the heat spreader for the cpu, so I should be able to remove and clean them without actually exposing the cpu and gpu dyes. 

[DreamCat04]

On 1/23/2023 at 2:06 PM, paulo7702 said:

Thanks for the advice, I just got the battery today and am going to replace that for sure.

For mine I'm also considering replacing the battery. After two years, it's down to just 75% capacity. Mostly because I once put it away for 3 months, but I forgot to charge it previously. So it probably underdischarged itself over those 3 months