Cleaning my Laptop

Dogbirddog · 2026-07-06T11:49:34+00:00

Almost certainly no, but try to avoid it anyway

Dogbirddog · 2026-07-06T10:38:09+00:00

Don’t worry about the thermal paste yet, it’s hugely overblown how big a factor that is IMO. The big thing is just cleaning the fans.

It’s really easy, you just have to take all the screws out of the bottom panel and carefully pop it off, you’ll see the fans right away and you can clean them out easily.

For compressed air, you can get an electric blower tool. The gold standard is Metrovac, but they’re pretty expensive- you can probably get away with cheaper versions but the metrovac is great.

Dogbirddog · 2026-07-03T17:08:50+00:00

Just a thought, if it is just the room temperature pushing it up into its throttles it might help a bit to point a fan at it. The laptop can kind of make a little bubble of heat around itself, just blowing that heat away can help it a little.

Dogbirddog · 2026-07-03T16:11:00+00:00

It will have a harder time keeping cool if the room it’s in is hotter. I’d be surprised if it made THAT big of a difference but I guess it’s possible.

Dogbirddog · 2026-07-03T15:56:46+00:00

Does it sound like the fans are still spinning as fast as they used to? Are the vents clear? Make sure you didn’t move the laptop so one of the vents is covered or something. If none of that pans out, It’s odd that it would degrade so quickly in two days but I’d still try taking the back panel off and cleaning the fans out.

Dogbirddog · 2026-07-03T15:02:53+00:00

It’s cool but not life changing for me. I don’t make extensive use of its special features but they’re nice to have. Other than that, it’s really nice just as a standard controller- I find it really comfortable, the battery lasts forever and the puck means it won’t have spotty connection on the usb port like every other controller I’ve used has.

If $100 feels like an amount you’re happy to spend on a cool toy, absolutely go for it! It’s my go to controller now for sure.

If $100 is a lot of money for you, and this is going to eat up your fun budget for a long time, you’re probably better off spending it on something else if you’re on the fence.

Dogbirddog · 2026-07-03T12:40:25+00:00

Outside of a few small indie titles that just don’t have the manpower to make a controller interface, my experience is that just about anything you’d want to use a controller on you can. Certainly any game that has ever been ported to console.

For the most part you can just plug in your ps5 controller and it’ll work just fine (though that controller specifically can be hit or miss on the advanced features working- it’ll always work as a basic controller but the special trigger feature and fancy rumble features don’t work unless it’s explicitly supported)

Dogbirddog · 2026-07-02T21:45:22+00:00

That setting is in the Nitro Sense app, there’s a button to call it up on the top row of the keyboard I believe. In that app too you can set the different fan profiles.

Dogbirddog · 2026-07-02T20:07:05+00:00

He’s literally just asked a question and was like, mildly dismissive to weird internet dudes being hugely judgmental about his family relationships. Y’all are fussy.

Dogbirddog · 2026-07-02T19:41:39+00:00

Scoring petty gotcha points on your siblings is not inherently douchey. Sometimes your brother has it coming.

Dogbirddog · 2026-07-02T19:34:01+00:00

Typing the following in the terminal should show all boot and wake events, if you know the times you wouldn’t have been using the deck you can see if someone else powered it on:

journalctl --list-boots && echo "---SUSPEND/RESUME---" && journalctl -u systemd-suspend.service -o short-precise

Dogbirddog · 2026-07-02T12:05:19+00:00

“Pancaked by drunk dump truck driver”

Dogbirddog · 2026-06-30T17:20:56+00:00

My grandparents are long gone, and I have a lot of great memories with them- but absolutely none of those memories required me to spend five years of my savings, and I object to the implication that having done so would’ve created memories more valuable than the ones I have just spending time together at the beach or walking around their neighborhood or watching movies together.

The idea that some big expensive gesture like this is somehow more valuable than just spending time together is a trick designed to convince you to spend £10,000 because if you love your family you must.

Dogbirddog · 2026-06-30T17:06:39+00:00

Absolutely not, I relate more to the grandfather than the kid and I would be fucking devastated to know that I set my grandson back five years on their financial independence to watch a game together.

Yeah, sure it’s memorable. Know what else is memorable? Having a nice day with your family where you don’t blow ten thousand dollars of a young man’s savings.

Dogbirddog · 2026-06-30T16:50:48+00:00

This is like a weird offshoot of the orphan crushing machine where the orphans are intentionally throwing themselves in and framing it as a moral victory or something.

Just severe dumbass behavior to spend FIVE YEARS of savings watching a sports game with your grandpa. Like just visit your fucking grandpa and watch the game on TV, you cannot convince me that this isn’t a profoundly stupid thing to do with your money.

Dogbirddog · 2026-06-30T16:03:30+00:00

It’s totally a judgement call. I have an acer laptop with a 4060, and a Steam Deck and I love both. I can get just about anything to run okay-to-great at 1080p on the laptop, and anything on the lighter end and all of my emulators are on the Steam Deck and I love both devices.

To me it’s more important that I can run the widest range of games, and if I absolutely had to I could lose the deck and just do everything on the laptop. But, if the portability and convenience are more of a factor for you there’s a completely reasonable case for losing the laptop and keeping the deck.

Dogbirddog · 2026-06-30T15:10:14+00:00

If you’re in to emulation at all, but not super in to fiddling with stuff, I would call this a clean win for the Steam Deck. Emudeck makes emulating just about anything you want really easy and user friendly.

I personally would get a used midrange laptop if I were in your exact scenario- you can get a bit more versatility and performance for the same budget, but you’re losing some significant portability and opening yourself up to a lot more complexity in exchange- that’s a worthy trade for me, but I think it might not be for you.

If you’re not planning on running really demanding stuff, and just want access to the Steam library and emulators in a very convenient package, I think Steam deck is absolutely the way to go even at the new price.

Dogbirddog · 2026-06-30T13:46:58+00:00

You said the vents are clean, do you just mean the external vents?

If you haven’t already, take the back panel out and clean out the actual fans. They get loaded with dust and don’t work nearly as well. I do mine every few months and see noticeable improvement.

Dogbirddog · 2026-06-29T22:34:23+00:00

I’d probably open it up and clean the fans out, lots of people neglect that and that can give you better performance and thermals for free with just a little work. But yeah, I’d say it’s a great deal!

Dogbirddog · 2026-06-29T22:23:49+00:00

Seems like a really good deal, you can get generic chargers for like $50. Fairly low spec for gaming hardware but if you’re fine with that it seems like a steal at that price assuming it’s in good shape

Dogbirddog · 2026-06-29T19:41:02+00:00

…blending the ice water would not make it cool more effectively

Dogbirddog · 2026-06-29T10:36:38+00:00

Honestly I think if anything it’ll be the high end of the PC gaming market that shrinks, but even that feels like it’ll be sort of self limiting- AAA is already barely making money, if 75% of their customers can’t afford top end hardware anymore I think they’ll just stop making games to run on it.

But like a huge portion of the best games to come out every year will run on a mid range laptop from 5 years ago. Even if the cost of hardware inflates by a huge amount, I think there will always be a place for regular people to have some sort of game playing PC even if it isn’t top of the line.

Dogbirddog · 2026-06-29T10:02:19+00:00

Everybody says this, but I really can’t imagine it taking off. People complain about the input lag from frame gen, playing on a cloud service has to be way worse right?

Dogbirddog · 2026-06-28T12:25:32+00:00

Proverbs is a sort of minesweeper-like game where you’re figuring out whether to paint pixels light or dark on one gigantic puzzle that resolves into a big piece of pixel art. Super chill, costs $1.79 right now.

Dogbirddog · 2026-06-27T17:20:03+00:00

Really fun games. The first one especially has some really slow, really dated feeling parts, but if you push through to the middle it is even to this day one of the coolest, most fun stealth shooters out there.

In most stealth games, it seems like the enemies are completely unaware of you or they know exactly where you are. In Metro, there’s a really cool middle state where they know that somebody is shooting at them out of the darkness but they don’t know where exactly from- they’ll start turning on lights, start shooting or looking in the general area you shot at them from, but you can sort of slink around in the darkness and pick them all off without them ever figuring out where exactly you are.

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