replacing SSD and installing lightweight Linux is easy, cleaning the ducts, blower and checking and replacing cooling paste just makes it perform a lot better and needs more effort.
Check temperatures to make sure the CPU/GPU isnt throttling
2.1) If so, open the laptop and change the termal paste to something like artic silver 5, MX-4, MX-2 or noctua nt-h1
2.2) If the cpu continues hot, try to undervolt it (watch this video for more info, $12 Hack To Boost Your Laptop Performance! - YouTube)
2.3) Make sure that there isn’t any dead fan
That shit still exists? I remember paying like $10 for a tube of that for my AMD nuclear weapon Athlon. It did help cool like 2c more than the stock free shit, but that’s like throwing an ice cube at the sun.
SSHD access going very far south probably means that the NAND is having issues, and it’s gone to “oh shit” territory. The bad news- you can’t use SMART to get useful data because it uses the ‘bad reads’ counter for cache failures (at least Seagate does).
It depends on the quality of his current paste. I repasted my gf’s old laptop, the cpu was one of those old t4200 Pentiums, it was running at 75C 'ish. After applying new paste it went down to 40 something. But at that point the paste wasn’t even paste, it was solid and looked like tiny rocks.
Since OP said that the laptop is old it may just be shitty paste that is causing the CPU to overheat and then throttle, that can be confirmed with any temperature monitoring software
Much as breathing water isn’t good for electronic things.
Updating the paste may cool it down, but we don’t even know if it’s overheating. This can be a rather time consuming task - and is NOT a task for someone who has never opened their laptop before.
To use a car analogy- the first time you change oil, it’s empowering. You don’t start off with an engine swap, unless you’ve got a hell of a good mentor.
Someone should make a tech/electric DIY thread. Could post some pics of Xbox Original mods I did a while back. I’m sure lots of members have interesting stuff they’ve worked on.
I think I don’t just pay for performance when I get Arctic Silver 5 or MX-5 (which are both actually quite cheap nowadays and you get build a stockpile whenever you buy parts that include them) but also how easy it is to apply, remove/clean, etc. Anyway if you’re going to repaste you might as well get the nice stuff, it’s like skimping on a PSU… no point. Also, you could get the new graphite pads (solid pads, can reuse hundreds of times!) if you like.
To be fair, if it’s really old and depending on how it has been ran (it’s a laptop so likely on/off constantly, which dries out paste faster), it could literally be a solid right now that is exchanging barely any heat. I saw that in like 4/5 of the 10 year old Xbox’s I pulled apart.