I can think of at least three good reasons to clean your laptop:

1) Over time, it’s gotten scungy with the normal detritus of life
2) You have spilled something on it like your latte
3) It is starting to overheat – a situation that is almost always caused by too much dust in the heat sink for the CPU.

A symptom of overheating is this: your laptop turns off or resets randomly for no apparent reason.

Whatever your motivation, when it gets to be time for a thorough cleaning, this video can help:

This video is excellent if you are seeing signs of overheating:

You can see in that video just how bad the dust that causes overheating can get. It’s amazing what can collect on the heatsink. Clean out the dust and your laptop will run like new.

BTW: in many laptops, you can get into the settings screen of the BIOS and see the CPU temperature. Or check out this link for the names of a couple popular programs.

[[[See previous LS (how to save a soaked cell phone)]]]