How to fix HP Pavillion dv6-7073ca error 90b on startup?

[intel_bentium]

I've looked this up and it seems its a problem with the system cooling. The machine is fairly old (about 4 years), so I'm suspecting the fan is dying or dust is clogging it up. The cpu temperatures reach about 60-70 degrees when idling. How would I fix this? Would it be worth it to try to open it up and clean it out and/or replace the cpu cooler?

 

[USAFRet]

4 years old.
Never been cleaned.
Idle temp of 60-70C.

Yes, you need to open it up and blow the dust out.

 

[10tacle]

I have a five year old Pavilion G7. The fan died after two years. I didn't even use it much so that was a red flag of HP using cheap fans. I bought a replacement on Amazon for $5 and it's been running ever since. Word of caution: if you have not worked on a laptop before, look up your model and see if someone put a video on Youtube taking it apart. The technical manual will not give you all the details of a complete disassembly which in my G7 was the situation to remove the cooler. Take note of the case screws too as they are going to be different sizes and depths. I drew a map on paper of the screw hole pattern of the bottom and then taped every screw to that diagram on the paper.

Also, while you are replacing the fan, remove the old thermal paste and put some good quality paste on in. The factory paste wasn't applied very well on top of it being cheap. That dropped my load temps by over 5C. This is also a good time to upgrade your CPU if it allows that and you want to go to a faster i7. Like if yours has the 2.3GHz 3610QM i7, you could drop in a 3.0GHz 3940XM. The question is if you think it would be worth the cost for the performance boost. There's one on eBay now for $285.

I upgraded mine from an i3 to a 400MHz faster i5 for only $80 so there it was worth it to me. Unfortunately I didn't test just that CPU upgrade alone in benchmarks as I also upgraded to an SSD and upgraded the memory at the same time. It was like getting a new and faster laptop for ~$270.