Tinkering with my old Acer Travelmate C310
Well I had a few minutes today so I finally got around to looking at what’s wrong with my C310. For the last few years I’ve had to underclock the processor or the CPU temperature would go abouve 100 degrees C and funny stuff would start happening. Even running at half speed (~ 1000MHz), the CPU would idle at 80-90 degrees. Seems a bit hot.
I bought a new Toshiba last year, but I missed my old computer (hey, at least it’s running XP instead of that crappy Vista!) so I thought I’d give repairing it a whirl.
I had tried to take it apart before, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it. The case seemed glued together despite all the screws coming out. Well, the Service Manual helped. (Local cache: Acer TravelMate C300 Service Manual). Even with that I was stuck on the cryptic remove keyboard directions until I found this:
Hi there! Stumbled across your blog while looking for more info on the C300. I’m typing this on a C300 with 1 GB of RAM, and I thought I’d share the method for upgrading the RAM. As an aside, shame on ACER for the poor split-location memory design, and even more shame for not even mentioning it in the manual!
Ok, the second ram slot is under the keyboard, but it’s not as tough to get to as past models may have been. You’ll notice a little round doohicky between the F12 and the prtsc key. There are two others between F4-F5 and ESC F1. Take a paperclip, straighten one side of it, and put that side in the doohicky. pull down towards the front of the computer. Each will slide a couple of mm’s and click. Flip the computer over, and tere’s a screw in the middle of the computer labled “KB”. Remove it.
You can now lift the keyboard out of the computer by pulling up on the Function row. Carefully lift it up and rotate it towards the touchpad. There is a ribbon cable attaching it to the computer. Now very carefully pry out the extremely poorly designed cost-saving clip that retains the ribbon cable to the computer. I can’t believe Acer used this rather than the typical “cam’d” locking clip. Once you remove that, hopefully in one piece, you’re home free.
The memory slot is under the metal cover you’re now looking at. Remove the 6 or 7 screws that retain it, and slide it towards the screen and up and out. Ta-da! you’re set.
Don’t be afraid of the ribbon cable. The only thing you need to make sure of is that the cable isn’t backwards, but it’ll be obvious which way it goes back in. You just press it back in and put the clip over it to retain it. After putting the metal cover/framwork back in place, the keyboard will click back into place by pushing on the left and right sides. Flip the computer over and re-install the KB screw, and you’re done :)
So with those instructions in hand, I disassembled the TravelMate C310.
When I finally got the heatsink off — I saw the problem. There was nothing between the chip and the heatsink. Usually there’s some thermal paste or a pad of some kind… but no luck.
Threw some Arctic Silver on it and voila.
The only mistake I made was that the nvidia chip DID have a thermal pad between heatsink & chip. Normally, the Arctic Silver folks recommend not to use those but to use paste instead, so I took it off & dabbed arctic silver on it too.
Unfortunately the heat sink is mounted several mm above the chip (room for the pad!) so I suspect the heat transfer will not be ideal. I’ll have to get a replacement pad thingie. Ah well, wasn’t exactly planning on playing games on this old clunker, anyway.
Anyway, it’s running like a charm. Faster than my dual-core Toshiba running Vista, natch. (That’s what a lean install can do…). CPU idling at 70 degrees (still hot but it’s a crappy Intel chip, what can I say), and it hasn’t climbed above 82 degrees with the CPU maxed out for several minutes.
Yay! … now to run Windows Update for the last 12 months of patches… :S
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