Dell Inspiron 7720 overheating & high memory usage fix – October 21, 2015

Hello people. It’s P&T IT BROTHER. Today’s computer is a Dell Inspiron 7720 laptop which was in our shop not so long ago with the preparing automatic repair problem. After the issue was fixed on that day, we have told the customer that there were few other problems. It was overheating, and after 10 – 20 minutes of use, it starts to slow down seriously so you cannot do almost anything. We found out the reason today. This laptop has 8GB DDR3 memory, but for some reason, the memory usage was really high, and that is what causes the slow computing after some time. We decided to perform a cleaning job. Also we need to obtain more system memory by shutting down Windows feature and programs.

This is the Dell Inspiron 7720 laptop. It is a high end Inspiron series. It’s got Intel i7-3630QM quad-core processor with Hyper Threading technology with Nvidia GeForce GT 650M video chip.

It looks like it has one more extra hard drive bay. Wow, there is Samsung SSD too.

Above the wireless networking card is the Samsung 32GB SSD.(Left)

Let’s take them out from the laptop. 🙂 🙂 🙂

Removing the keyboard. This one is very special. There is one more cable. Wonder what the cable is for.

Now we see the motherboard. The air duct and the cooling fan look cleaner than we expected.

Inspecting the motherboard. Everything looks okay. 😀

When we removed the cooling fan from the motherboard, some of the air duct was clogged with dust. Let’s get it cleaned up.

As we expected, the thermal compound on video chip and the i7 processor are dried out. We need to clean up the existing thermal compound first. The dried out thermal compound degrades your cooling performance. The laptop is about 3 years old, and it never had any cleaning services. If your laptop is more than 2 years old, it is better to check the cooling system.

Nice and Shiny! 😀 This is the Nvidia GeForce GT 650M chipset. This Dell Inspiron 7720 laptop is designed to use Intel 4000 graphics when you do not need a powerful GPU performance, and when you need more power, it uses Nvidia Geforce GT 650M.

Here is the monster CPU. Intel i7-3630QM quad-core processor with Hyper Threading technology. 4 physical cores + 4 logical cores. It is not a true octa-core, but we can say it is a octa-core processor. 😀 It is a high performance CPU, but also produces a massive heat.

New thermal compound applied on both video and CPU. Looks like a tooth paste. 😀

It is important to cover all the chip surface with the thermal compound. A nicely applied thermal compound will result better cooling performance than poorly applied thermal compound. (lower temperature)

Heatsink installed again. 😀

Laptop assembly completed! 😀 Time to turn on and fix the high memory usage issue. This laptop has Windows 8.1.

There were two programs that caused the high system memory. (RAM) One was Google Drive, and the other one was Dropbox. The customer has many files to be synced, and as they try to sync, it requires big system memory. We have disabled the two programs from Windows startup. (customer can run the programs manually when he needs) We also disabled all the Windows features that the customer won’t really need. (like fancy visual effects, and etc) The Inspiron 7720 runs cool now. Also the average processor temperature dropped from 70C-90C to 50C-70C. There was a big difference.

Thank you!