Laptop Fan Upgrade

[ElizaS]

Is upgrading an old laptop's fan possible?


Edit: before I signed up, I wrote the rest of the question but it seems to have disappeared. In any case...


I have a six year old Dell Inspiron 1525, which I plan on taking with me to college when I start this fall.
I only use it for the light stuff - office, browsing, some multimedia. However, even with that (it's got Win 7), it runs a little slow and it gets really hot really quickly - so hot, it smells like something's actually burning. The palm rest gets too hot to even touch sometimes.
So I figured I'd upgrade it a little. I got an SSD (which I figured, despite being expensive, it's an investment) and I even snagged a T8300 processor (the highest I can upgrade to) for £21. It's got 2GB of ram which I reckon I'm alright with - it'd be a waste of money to upgrade to 4 anyway.
It's just the fan that's an issue for me right now. I've got a laptop cooler, but it's not always the most practical solution.
As such, I was wondering if it's possible to maybe upgrade to a better fan? Or liquid cooling perhaps? (is that possible?)
I'm really sorry, I'm not much of a techie and I know next to nothing about this sort of thing - I just Google and read a lot of articles and stuff, but this was one issue which I couldn't find a solution to.
Thank you!


PS: I know it doesn't seem sensible to upgrade this old thing, but it's more out of sentiment than anything. The laptop was a present (my first computer) from my grandma and she passed away a few months back. I wouldn't even be in college if it wasn't for her, so I just wanted this to be the computer that gets me through the next five years.



Second edit: I should also add that I've cleaned it out and reapplied thermal paste. It probably helped a little bit, but not much.
Thank you!

 

[Dblkk]

Is upgrading an old laptop's fan possible?


Edit: before I signed up, I wrote the rest of the question but it seems to have disappeared. In any case...


I have a six year old Dell Inspiron 1525, which I plan on taking with me to college when I start this fall.
I only use it for the light stuff - office, browsing, some multimedia. However, even with that (it's got Win 7), it runs a little slow and it gets really hot really quickly - so hot, it smells like something's actually burning. The palm rest gets too hot to even touch sometimes.
So I figured I'd upgrade it a little. I got an SSD (which I figured, despite being expensive, it's an investment) and I even snagged a T8300 processor (the highest I can upgrade to) for £21. It's got 2GB of ram which I reckon I'm alright with - it'd be a waste of money to upgrade to 4 anyway.
It's just the fan that's an issue for me right now. I've got a laptop cooler, but it's not always the most practical solution.
As such, I was wondering if it's possible to maybe upgrade to a better fan? Or liquid cooling perhaps? (is that possible?)
I'm really sorry, I'm not much of a techie and I know next to nothing about this sort of thing - I just Google and read a lot of articles and stuff, but this was one issue which I couldn't find a solution to.
Thank you!


PS: I know it doesn't seem sensible to upgrade this old thing, but it's more out of sentiment than anything. The laptop was a present (my first computer) from my grandma and she passed away a few months back. I wouldn't even be in college if it wasn't for her, so I just wanted this to be the computer that gets me through the next five years.



Second edit: I should also add that I've cleaned it out and reapplied thermal paste. It probably helped a little bit, but not much.
Thank you!

Don't know of anything you can do beyond actually engineering a replacement fan yourself that you could upgrade your fan. You could find the exact make/model fan and replace it with a identical like model. But fans in laptops are pretty specific. Cleaning it out and reapplying better thermal paste is likely the best thing you can do. But over time, cpu's will degrade and become slower which the laptop then tries to fix by adding more voltage to allow the chip to clock higher. Which then brings more heat as well.

I realize you don't want to upgrade your laptop, and the ssd upgrade was probably the best thing you can do, im sure you could find another 2gb ram for cheap and that would really help out as well. But I would open it up, and clean it out (yes you did that already) but clean off the thermal paste that's already there and replace it with new thermal paste ($5). Thermal paste dries up over time, and after several years is really doing nothing more than adding a layer the heat has to go through before getting to the heatsink, making heat actually worse than before. Artic silver is the fan favorite, and easy to apply, little is better, more is worse. Little grains of salt, watch a few youtube videos on how to apply perfectly as you can put to much on (happens probably more often than putting on just enough) way to easily and make heat worse, or you can (not normally) put not enough on and make it worse.

 

[Thanatognomonic]

Laptop fans are made in a tight-as-possible form factor whilst also made to dissipate as much heat as possible.
I'd personally suggest trying to keep ambient temperatures down (may be difficult with this summer weather). If you can see no way of keeping it cool through these methods then you could pick up a notebook cooler.
You should remember, laptops are designed to run at hotter temperatures than computers due to their much smaller-form factor. As long as the laptop is still RUNNING like it should, then I'd simply suggest going with one of the two methods I've suggested in the previous paragraph.

 

[ElizaS]

Thank you!