It's been more than 16 months since I bought my first, and still one-and-only laptop, Asus F3Jc (lain). And even if most ppl say Asus is synonym for crappy hardware prone to failure, I still like it ^.^.

It has dedicated graphics (gf 7300go), nice connectivity (bt and 802.11 a/b/g) and mainly VTX enabled Core 2 \^^/ (t5600).

Only thing that annoyed me lately was that it was getting little more noisy and hot than I would like. And since I bought myself new tube of thermal paste as a xmas gift from a3c, I decided to peek inside and clean/re-paste everything possible.

Theres only one way to describe the result:

Huge success111

before pasting:
idle: 43°C, fan around ~1800rpm
full load: 74°C, fan running madly

after pasting:
idle: 39°C, fan is turned off
full load: 54°C, fan running at 1800rpm \^^/

Some pictures should be in gallery, but don't expect more than PDA quality.

update:
In meantime (between writing this post and remembering to publish it) I've opened another two notebooks, Asus A6R and HP nx8220, for pretty much same reasons...

And judging from what I saw inside, I must say that my Asus F3Jc has much robust cooling system than HP and without any noticeable weight difference. I just don't believe that some 0.3mm aluminum thermal plate can be enough to cool dedicated graphics and chipset. That also explains why the HP was so loud when my second cousin tried to play Oblivion on that machine.

But having notebook from HP also has its positives, ie. that cool maintenance manual that really comes in handy when you try to get to the heatsink... juts too many hidden screws ^^.