A friend asked me if I would help him out of dilemma with his Dell Studio 1558. He had begun disassembling his laptop in order to replace a very noisy fan. He soon became overwhelmed and asked me if I would finish what he had started. I finished disassembling the laptop and removing the motherboard in order to get at the fan. I replaced the fan after removing the heat sink. I also cleaned the thermal material from the heat sink and processor, reapplied Arctic Silver 5 and reassembled the laptop. While the laptop was disassembled I made certain to remove any dust that I saw. The laptop booted up but shut down almost immediately. Because I was uncertain the fan was running, I ordered a second fan and went through the exact same process again. This time, I’m certain the fan runs while the laptop is on. While the 1558 manages to run a little longer, it shutdowns after 2-3 minutes. The laptop does not feel hot to the touch even immediately after shutting down.
After searching Google using “Dell Studio 1558 overheating” I encountered pages of reports from people who own this laptop complaining of random shutdowns. Apparently, Dell’s original BIOS was responsible for failing to manage the fan’s operation properly, but upgrading the BIOS frequently does not solve the problem. Since the laptop has the original BIOS, I still would update it, but in this instance I’m fearful I might “brick” it if the 1558 shutdown.
I’m all but certain the current fan is functional. There is no significant accumulation of dust. The only remaining ideas I have is to (1) replace the thermal paste with thermal tape since tape was what was originally used or (2) take a risk and try updating the BIOS.
I would welcome any additional thoughts. I’d love to hear from anyone who owned or repaired a Studio 1558 and solved this common overheating problem.
