Toshiba Satellite P30 and P35 laptops. Removing and cleaning heatsink to fix laptop overheat problem.
Overheating is a very common issue with Toshiba Satellite P30 and P35 laptops. If your laptop suddenly shuts down by itself and the bottom of the laptop base is very hot then most likely the laptop overheats. It happens because the heatsink gets completely clogged with lint and dust and doesn’t disperse the heat properly. Unfortunately, this model doesn’t have a hatch for an easy heatsink access. To remove and clean the heatsink the laptop has to be taken apart completely. Disassembly process is very similar to Toshiba Satellite A70 and A75 model. After you remove and clean the heatsink you should apply new thermal grease on the CPU, do not use old grease. You can buy thermal grease in any local computer shop or online. Artic Silver is a good brand.
If you are not sure that you can take apart the laptop, do not open the case. Try to clean the heatsink and cooling fans with compressed air first. Buy a can of compressed air and blow inside the openings on the bottom of the laptop. If the heatsink is not clogged completely, this measure might be enough to fix the laptop overheating problem.
March 17th, 2007 at 8:03 pm
Gwen,
White – main and black – auxiliary.
March 17th, 2007 at 2:48 pm
Great Site!I took apart and cleaned my p35 and my problem is I dont know where the wires to the wi fi card
(black and white)one side says man.and the other says auto!How do they go?? Thanks Gwen
March 6th, 2007 at 4:13 am
Hi,
Thanks for the advise. After months of persistent involuntary shutdowns in the middle of poker hands
, I took my P30 down to my local Golf Club where they have a high power compressed air shoe cleaner. Blowing into the fan vents dislodged an unbelievable amount of dust and the laptop is now operating as new! A great solution and much cheaper than PC World!
February 27th, 2007 at 9:06 pm
I have a Toshiba satelite A85 that turns itself off after 10 minutes use. The fan makes a noise most of the time. it has been sent back under warranty and had a new fan put in. One month later the same problem. i see that there is a thread going regarding other models. Is anyone else having a problem with this model?
February 7th, 2007 at 5:15 pm
Hi, i just put my laptop together and now it keeps restarting. Any idea why?
January 23rd, 2007 at 10:14 am
I have some dirty pictures to add to anyone’s collection….The grills were really gummed up, after two years in a smoking, dusty location…..the maid quit.
So now, multitasking is quiet, and thermal shutdowns are somewhere in the far future, unless I set it on the bed, without thinking about the air flow. I have a TV dinner-tray that fits the footprint of the P35. So in bed, I set it in the tray, to allow for air flow…
Thanks for your excellent instructions, and pictures!
January 12th, 2007 at 7:42 am
Hi Gary, my name is Chris and I have the same problem computer as you, the great p-35! This computer would be great if it worked…but, it does not most of the time….Hey, my lcd is shot, and I emailed you to ask if you would sell one of your lcd’s as mine is shot…if anyone has a lcd for my p35, please feel free to drop me a line at sungraphicsataoldotcom.
January 7th, 2007 at 4:11 pm
I got it working! I didn’t realize that the you could remove the CPU. Once i had that off and secured it properly it worked!. Once again thanks for a great service you are providing.
Now it’s just weird to have my fan go ff because thy aren’t needed!
January 7th, 2007 at 2:16 pm
Oh and also. When I had it apart and unscrewed the heatsink the CPU came off with it. It seemed like it was really attached so I didn’t want to remove it. So I just cleaned everything up and then reseated the cpu and heatsink.
January 7th, 2007 at 2:09 pm
Hey there great site and great instructions. I have a P35-6292 that had some serious dust so I took it apart. I got everything togther and now my laptop will not boot up. I went through all the comments here and tried to reseat the mememory. Still nothing.
Anyone mail me if they have any ideas.
botunda – at- gmail.com
January 2nd, 2007 at 7:44 pm
Just wanted to say thanks for the great website. Keep up the good work. The Satellite P35-S609 that I own has been a gem until recently. It started to randomly shutoff and when a restart was tried it would shutoff immediatly. I was within one paycheck of buying a new battary when I decided to go ahead an take the laptop apart and clean the CPU heatsink (for $#!^$ and giggles.) for all those out there that are not sure this will work for you…please give it a try or take it to a reputable PC repair station. I had originally dismissed the overheating as there was no visible dust or debris on the fan or heatsink fins. When I took the laptop apart the amount of dust between the fins and the fan was incredible.
Again Kudos and Thanks for the Tip
December 29th, 2006 at 8:56 am
After removing an amazing amout of dust and lint from the heatsinks the CPU is now running between 60-65C (average 61C) through the most intensive CPU processes whereas before it was topping out at 78-79C. That’s a 32F difference!
Thanks for the detailed step-by-step instructions. It solved my mysterious shutdown issue.
December 20th, 2006 at 4:37 am
i have a p30 toshiba and it started dropping back to windows now 3 mounths later it is diying completly could this over heating be the problem it has been into toshiba in Auckland. Come back saying nothing wrong
Still dyeing after 15 minuites and some tmes longer
December 12th, 2006 at 6:39 pm
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
This grealy helped me take apart my brothers P30 and clean out the gunk that had built up inside.
November 14th, 2006 at 7:55 pm
Hi
Mark, I have the same problem on my p30 laptop, and i am totally disappointed with toshiba.
lines everywhere, disappears,come back,, large white blocks all around my screen 
November 8th, 2006 at 3:23 am
I’ve got two of the above problems, lines on the screen and overheating.
I’ve taken my laptop to service centre for cleaning once, but that was a bit expensive. I’ve cleaned it twice afterwards, and replaced the grills at the bottom with some foam filter.
Its really quite a pain.. looks like even with the foam filters, I’ll need to clean it again.
Also not happy with the lack of hardware monitors that support the laptop properly. Don’t know how to control the fan in linux either.
November 2nd, 2006 at 12:39 pm
Thanks a lot for the info cj2600,
I guess i have no choice but to live with the noise lol, since when i switch the mode to silent, it overheats even faster and shuts down quite frequently.
November 1st, 2006 at 11:35 pm
Glen4cindy,
Overheating is a common issue with this model. Even though you cannot see any dust on the heatsink, it still might have some dust inside and it could be enough for the laptop to overheat.
The laptop also might overheat if thermal grease dried out. In this case it would be necessary to replace the grease.
One more thing. Make sure that both fans spin on startup (you can see fans through the opening on the bottom of the laptop). If one of them fails, the laptop will overheat as well.
November 1st, 2006 at 11:26 pm
Josab,
I wouldn’t buy Thermal Material Remover for sure. You can use regular 99% isopropyl alcohol to clean up the CPU and the heatsink. Now about the thermal grease. I know that Arctic silver supposed to be a good stuff, but I never used it myself. For Toshiba Satellite P35 Toshiba lists a silicone grease with the following part number: X-23-7762-01. I guess that you can use any other grease you can find in a local computer store.
For the temperature control you can use this notebook hardware control and monitoring software. As you can see on the screenshot, you can control the CPU and HDD temperature, it also have many other options.
I don’t think that you can find better fans for your laptop. Satellite P30 is not the quietest notebook. I believe that if you access Toshiba power management utility in the control panel, you can switch the notebook performance from the best performance mode to the silent mode; it should keep fans more quiet. Yes, this model is louder then any other model, except Satellite A70/A75.
October 29th, 2006 at 5:29 pm
I have a Toshiba P35 laptop that I got for Christmas 2005 that is really great. The wifi range is incredible, better than I have every seen with any type of wifi adapter.
This laptop runs hotter than any laptop I have ever encountered. I got a large plastic laptop pad from Wal-Mart and did not have any more problems until this week. I have had the intermitent spontaneous shutdown problem several times in the last 3 days. There is NO dust visible in what I can see of the heat sinks. This is under warranty so, I am going to let the service center fix it, but, does this sound like the typical overheat problem with this unit? I’m a Dell technician, so I know my way around disassembly of laptops and am not afraid of doing this, but, while it’s under warranty, I am not going to chance voiding my warranty and being told that I did something to it by a service center! As of right now, the computer will not even completely boot to windows before it does it’s shutdown symptom. I think after reading what I have been so far, it would be very wise to purchase an extended warranty for this unit.
Thanks for any ideas.
October 29th, 2006 at 3:12 pm
I was wondering if the following is the right thermal grease and would i need to also buy this?
And where can i check what temperature my computer is at?
Lastly, i was wondering if there are better fans that work on the p30′s that are good and quite, honestly, my p30 is really loud compared to other laptops.
Thanks guys.
October 23rd, 2006 at 10:19 pm
Coutaud Jean-Marie,
Take a look at the example 2 on this post. Do you have a similar line on your laptop? If yes, then most likely it’s the LCD failure.
You can connect an external monitor for test. If that’s the video card failure, both screens, the internal LCD and the external monitor should display the same defect (a vertical line in your case).
October 23rd, 2006 at 3:36 am
I fixed this problem some months ago.
Now i have a new problem.
How I can fixed the vertical white strip on my laptop Toshiba satellite P30?
A friend suggested me by replacing the inverter.
After replacement, No change.
Is the problem coming from the graphic board (behind the lcd screen) or the lcd screen itself?
Waiting an answer…
Thanks.
September 21st, 2006 at 7:55 am
Hey guys, one of my friends has a P30, and had the same exact issues as you described: overheating (80 Celcius and more!), and frequent shutdowns when cpu hits the ceiling.
Now, I managed to clean the CPU, removed the old thermal grease, applied new (just the correct ammount), cleaned the dust in the heatsink (couldnt even see thru it), but now it just seems to top at 75C, and even tho it wont reboot, I fear his CPU was damaged by overheating.
Now, since I don’t think I can manage to find another 3.06 P4
, does any socket 478 CPU (with a 533 FSB of course) fits in there?
September 9th, 2006 at 11:40 am
Satellite P30 screen is very expensive. I would probably wait until it appears on eBay for a reasonable price, because online stores ask tons of money for it.
September 9th, 2006 at 11:10 am
Yes I saw the third picture you said and it’s exactly the same problem I’m having. guess I may have to change the lcd screen after all. f….g costly affair.
will probably use it till it gets worse and then opt for the change. any suggestions where I could buy a used lcd screen?
thanks for your help
September 9th, 2006 at 10:51 am
Sudhir Multani,
Take a look at the third picture in this post. Is it similar to your screen? If yes, then most likely the screen is bad and if you want to get rid of these lines, you’ll have to replace the screen.
September 9th, 2006 at 10:39 am
I have a Toshiba Satellite P35 notebook. Recently one vertical line appeared about 2″ from the left of the lcd. after a week one more appeared about 5″ from the right. Now there are in all 5 thin vertical lines permanently present and refuse to go away. The notebook is working fine though.
Can you help me remove these lines? Please advise what I should do
August 26th, 2006 at 9:26 pm
Jeff,
Satellite P35 has only one backlight bulb, on the bottom of the screen. Here’s a generic notebook display assembly diagram.
You did everything right. I would also try replacing the FL inverter first. Unfortunately, it didn’t help you. Is it a bad inverter again? Possible, but not very likely. It’s very hard to troubleshoot the backlight problem without any test equipment. It could be a bad backlight bulb, bad video cable or bad motherboard. A test backlight bulb would help you greatly. I’ve tried to figure out how to test the FL inverter board with a multimeter, but it wasn’t successful. I don’t really know how to do it. Usually I just install my test parts.
I would also check the lid close switch located under the keyboard strip. To remove the keyboard strip, follow steps 5-6 here. Do not forget to unplug the power and remove the battery first. After you remove the strip, check the lid close switch on the motherboard; make sure that it moves freely. Sometimes, the switch can stuck inside and the backlight will not turn on (a very dim image still would be on the screen).
August 25th, 2006 at 7:37 pm
I have a p35-s629 (not 6292). The backlight has gone out as I can see a dim image with light shown from a narrow angle. PC works fine otherwise.
I replaced the inverter board…and…still doesnt work. So…could be two bad inverter boards. Can you tell me what the voltage should measure across the output side of the inverter?
If no voltage across output of either inverter, then they might be bad or the input to the inverter could be bad…which seems to point to either a broken connection (but remember screen shows image) or maybe a bad motherboard?
This model has two backlights I think, so the odds of them both going bad seems remote. But in case they have, can the CCFLs be replaced, or better to get a whole new LCD screen?
Looking for suggestions or the thing I havent thought of yet.
Jeff