I’ve been using this LinkSys WRT1900AC for ages, no idea how many years now. The router itself works fine, stability is basically unstoppable, it just doesn’t do much. LinkSys officially announced OpenWRT support for it, and the OpenWRT wiki has always said so, but the wiki also says the open-source firmware has a weak 5G signal, so I never bothered. Time passes though, OpenWRT is LEDE now, and I still hadn’t flashed it on the WRT1900AC. Recently I wanted to set up some magic internet access, and after looking around I found the firmware for the WRT1900AC has matured a lot, so I decided to give it a shot.

Summer’s here and my laptop keeps getting hotter, so time for a cooling mod. Besides the usual thermal paste swap, I also went after the SSD this time.

This ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2017 of mine has been in service for over a year now, and honestly I’m pretty happy with it. No plans to replace it — maybe next year, if the X1 Carbon still doesn’t have a 4K screen or any big leap forward, there’ll be no reason to upgrade. But it’s been a year, and lately some weird shit has started happening. Just watching YouTube makes it heat up… like, really hot. Weird, right? Shouldn’t be doing that. Then again, the thing is a year old, so my guess is the thermal paste is dead… no wait, dried out.

I never plug in my work laptop, so the battery wears out pretty fast. The X250 has two batteries. The external one is at 10% wear, still fine to keep using. The internal one is nearly at 50%, so I bought a replacement. eBay and AliExpress have them everywhere. Just grab a cheap one that looks legit. Same as always: tear it down and swap it.

The unit I use is a NetGear R6300. It’s been running without a reboot for a long time and it’s been pretty stable, but… It runs hot as hell! So I started thinking about how to cool it down, and just as I was about to search, a coworker next to me said there are ready-made kits online. Sure enough, a search on eBay turned some up… and they were cheap, so I went and bought one.

A while back I repasted the X250 and strapped on an external cooler, but it still wasn’t enough. The main problem: temps still blow up when it’s docked. Three reasons: Broadwell runs hot as hell to begin with The X250 has a single heat pipe, so the cooling is dogshit The X240/X250 dock is badly designed and doesn’t account for thermals at all Anyway, temps are exploding and I need to fix it, so I’ve got a few angles to attack from.

Recently I hooked my ThinkPad up to a dock and ran dual monitors, and the thing kept spiking to 90°C at the drop of a hat. I couldn’t take it anymore, so I decided to do something about it. The mod went two ways: repaste the thermal compound, and add external cooling.

There’s an old 3A-platform rig at home: AMD 965, R5770 GPU, 8 GB of RAM, and a crappy AMD motherboard. It still runs okay if you push it, but it’s a power hog. So I hauled it into the office. Conveniently, the crappy Lenovo desktop they’d issued me had died anyway. After reporting it, I found the old rig’s motherboard was on its way out, so I grabbed a cheap ASRock AM3+ board off Taobao. Listed as clearance stock — turned out to be brand damn new when it arrived. Literally new. Then, to deal with cooling, I bought a garbage Xuanbing 300 off JD. Good enough, I guess.

I picked up this ThinkPad X230 a year ago, and I’ve been tinkering with it on and off since. Swapped the SSD, swapped in a bigger drive, even swapped the screen. This time it was the cooling system’s turn. The machine itself doesn’t actually run that hot, and I can’t feel the heat or hear the fan, but the monitoring told another story. 55°C the moment it boots, fan spinning non-stop, and it shoots up to 60–70°C within minutes of hooking up an external monitor. The fan alone was pulling 10W, which was murdering my battery life. So I decided to tear it down, repaste, and clean out the dust. There are plenty of teardown guides out there; I followed this one. Disassembly went smoothly. Then I found the problem… there’s a huge gap between the southbridge chip and the heatpipe. It was originally bridged with a thermal pad, which I idiotically wiped off, and the thing was dried out anyway. Which means unless I slather on 0.4mm worth of thermal paste, there’s no way to guarantee proper contact between the heatpipe and the southbridge. The fix: thick paste, a thermal pad, or a copper shim. I went with the copper shim. Lucky for me there’s a decent shop here in Zhengzhou that does cooling and mod work. Grabbed a shim and some paste from them and got back to it.