Clean MacBook fan

Hey...

my 3 1/2 year old white Mac Book Intel Core 2 Duo is getting very loud lately... the fan is running 6200 rpm all the time when I'm in the internet and the CPU sometimes almost gets 90 °, especially when I look at flash contents. There are no CPU hungry processes in the background.

I was thinking I could open the MacBook carefully with the instruction from ifixit.com, block the fan and then gently blow or use a brush?

Any other ideas? Has anyone ever did this and could tell me if it's a good idea to do it yourself? And how to get the dust out of it?

Could be that the thermostat is broken.

But alternatively (and I would do this first), can you restart your machine and just leave it for around 5-10 minutes? If the fan starts up again by itself, you know it's not user input (launching an app say) and it'll be background processes. It also rules out the launching of Dashboard.

Bring up Activity Monitor and take a screenshot of it and we'll take it from there.

Btw. what browser do you use?

Check it isn’t full of dust and dirty beads. Where do those macbooks vent from? I’ve seen people get instant improvements on an overheating laptop by putting the vacuum cleaner up against the fan inlet, but that was with a big Dell laptop.

If its just some app you are fine with killing the process. I had the same issue with a 3 year old macbook pro. At the apple store I was told to replace the logicboard for 800 euro when I wanted to have the fans cleaned. now I got a cooling pad and everything works pretty well ( cant play games on it but make music )

this one I got:

I am still thinking about taking it apart. If you are brave enough to do it check ifixit

If you end up having to change the fan then I would recommend you watching this (even though it's a MacBook Pro)

  On 6/1/2011 at 2:34 PM, Squee said:

If you end up having to change the fan then I would recommend you watching this (even though it's a MacBook Pro)

 

that looks really easy compared to ifixit. maybe I should give it a try. thank you