Question Removing hard thermal paste

[Gee Willikers!]

I own an Alienware M15 r3 laptop, and one of the fans gave out. In order to replace it, I had to remove the heatsink, and therefore repaste.... Which is great because I always wanted to do so, so I figured 2 birds with 1 stone!

Unsurprisingly, I found that the factory thermal paste was completely dried and got to work on cleaning it up with 99.9% isopropyl alcohol.

After about an hour, I got it looking like this:
https://ibb.co/Q98d3zj
Granted, there was a lot more covering a lot of the green part of the GPU, but this last bit is being super stubborn. Thankfully, the CPU right next to it had the paste only applied to the chip and was much easier to clean.

What can I do to soften it up and remove it, or do I even need to bother as I've got the chip clean?

 

[BFG-9000]

While alcohol has both polar and non-polar bits making it sort of a universal solvent, old thermal paste dissolves much more easily into straight hydrocarbon oils like lighter fluid or kerosene, and you can use the alcohol to clean off the oil afterwards. That said, only the die top needs to be clean so what you have is good enough.