Alienware m14x heat problem

Hello,
I am one of many alienware users who has trouble with the laptop overheating. I used to call Alienware support and they fixed it in the past (twice with replacing the fan and one time by cleaning it). Problem is that my warranty has expired and I also think its weird this problem returns about every 10 months. By searching this forum I realised that it might need a repaste. Problem is that I am an absolute noob when it comes to technical stuff like this. So my laptop is the Alienware m14x R1 and its almost 3 years old and still has the same heating problems. When I use a program like Realtemp to measure the heat it goes to 99 degrees celcius (thats the maximum it can measure). I really do not know what to do. Nothing seems to help, I use a cooling pad and always have the back of my laptop lifted and I also try to keep the fans clean with compressed air. Do you people have any advise? please help.

EDIT: the laptop reaches these high temperatures when gaming, but even when im not gaming it can get up to 70 degrees and you hear the fans spin loudly within 5 minutes after startup

 

Still looking for help

 

Your comp definitely needs re-pasting. There are several videos available in YouTube showing how to re-paste. if you are absolutely not comfortable, I will say take a help from repair shops outside. but make sure you look at how they do it.

 

repasting is easy...
I think the problem is to tear the machine down to get access to cpu and gpu....can be tricky to people haven't done this before
Check out youtube, i believe there are many teardown video/tutorial on it

 

Oh thanks for your answer. Would it be possible to ask help from Dell for this? At this point im willing to pay alot to fix it.

 

You're much better off learning to do it yourself because it will have to be done every couple of months. Also blowing compressed air into the vents is not really gonna clean the fans out to well. Best way to do it is to remove the fan from the system and then blow it out. Dust build up happens with every machine, its just more noticeable with gaming machines because they run at higher temperatures. Heck I think its about time to clean out my M17x Fans/Heatsinks.

 

Oh yes, but the problem is that I'm really not technical at all. And even if a miracle would happen and I was able to reach the parts where I could aply the paste, I would still have to reassemble the whole thing.

EDIT: I mean reaaaaaaaally not technical, im the kind of person that uses a knife to get the screws out the back

 

Take the laptop to your local repair shop, repasting is rather a simple job which won't take long or cost much.

 

I've had the exact same problem, but repasting wasn't an option for me, I would have done that otherwise as it's actually not that hard to dissassemble the computer, which I've done more than once to clean the fan. The only thing that worked for me was to remove the optical drive and the ram "cage". Temps went down from 70 idle, on both the gpu and cpu, and 95-100 degrees on load, for both, to 40 degrees for the gpu and 45-50 cpu on idle, and 75 max on load for the gpu, 80 max on load for the cpu. I guess you could do that if you don't need the optical drive, and it does work wonders. Plus, you don't need more than a screwdriver, and you don't need to remove the whole motherboard as for the repaste. I still suggest you do a repaste though.

 

You could try follow this guy's post, he put up with some pretty detailed disassembly guide, if you follow his instruction closely, I think you'd be fine. Just remember to take it slow

Alienware M14x Disassembly/Teardown and Upgrade Guide!

And here is a full disassembly video guide from Alienware themselves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKuZYMHbp9Y

 

You can get help with that by contacting the OOW support. They'll be able to do it. A local PC repair shop could also help out.