I have an HP ENVY m4. Thus far it's been really great, apart from one very common problem with HP Laptops - the cooling is trash. I live in the middle east, so there's a lot of dust by default. This doesn't exactly help my cause. Quite recently my Laptop started overheating every now and then, especially when i run RS and watch a movie at the same time, or even just browse YT. This never used to happen before. I've had this laptop for probably a 18 months now and it's not been cleaned yet. I tried opening it the other day, but i couldn't. I don't know if i was missing any screws, but i doubt i was. I made sure to look everywhere, inspected for about 10 minutes before giving up.

I tried browsing the internet to see if there was a tutorial anywhere, but found no match. Only found matches to laptops similar, but even they didn't really offer much help.

 

I was wondering if anyone here has an ENVY m4, or knows how to open it? And might be able to talk me through the process of opening, and then cleaning the fan?

Can you see the heat sink from the outside? If so, if you have a can of compressed air or something similar (not a vacuum cleaner!), just blow into it. You should be able to dislodge the dust without opening it at all.

 

If you still want to open it, be aware that there may be some hidden screws.

There are instructions provided here in chapter 4:

http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c03600883.pdf

 

But it seems your laptop is not built in a very friendly way to dismantle for fan access.

You have to take out the harddrive, optical drive, wlan card and keyboard before you can even consider removing the top case to even get a glimpse of the fan.

You then actually have to remove what they call the 'system board' to get access to the fan assembly.