My Dell Dimen­sion 9200, I felt, was get­ting a little too warm. It wasn’t any­thing par­tic­u­larly dan­ger­ous, it’s just I felt it could do with a little more cool­ing. I occa­sion­ally clean it out every few months but the heat­sink and its fan are hid­den away under heav­ily screwed down plastic so I can’t get to them and dust was clog­ging them up. Until a few hours ago, I had never even seen them.

I ordered a new heat­sink (Akasa AK-965) and today I attemp­ted to install it. Of course, unin­stalling the old one was dif­fi­cult and there’s always that little niggle that makes you think you’re doing it wrong. I con­tin­ued, though, and man­aged to vacuum the incred­ible amount of dust that had amoun­ted over the 2 years.

I was in the final throes of com­ple­tion, I only had to place the new heat­sink into its place, pop the screws and plug the fan in. Of course, in the final stages, some­thing has to go wrong and for this little endeav­our, everything did. First, I found that the heat­sink didn’t line up the motherboard’s holes. Secondly, I found that the mother­board didn’t have a con­nec­tion for the heatsink’s fan (rather, a dif­fer­ent con­nec­tion to what the new heat­sink needed). Thirdly, I’d already taken all the old thermal paste off the pro­cessor at this point and it looked like I’d need to buy some more. And finally, no mat­ter how hard I tried to be care­ful, I man­aged to get thermal paste all over my fin­gers. Send­ing back the heat­sink will cost £5 — for a £10 product. To fin­ish off, as I’ve had to dis­mantle half my com­puter, I’ve now got two screws and I don’t know where they went.

It’s not all bad though: I’ve man­aged to scrape some of the new thermal paste onto the old heat­sink (and tem­per­at­ures have fallen dra­mat­ic­ally), I’ve been able to clean the fan and heat­sink and I have a spare heat­sink for a com­puter I hope to be build­ing this autumn.