Repaint and Water Cool Your Laptop

I'm sure that many of you have a six or seven year old laptop collecting dust. But why let it sit there when you could transform it into the coolest(no pun intended) laptop on the block?

During this guide you will learn how to paint your old laptop, put any image you like on it, and water cool it for good measure.

First of all, I want to thank Jack Ruby for his water cooled laptop, which was my inspiration to do this.

Step 1 Materials and Tools

Here are the materials I used:

- 2 1/4" X 3" X .2mm copper sheet
- About 5 feet of 5/16 OD X 3/16 ID clear vinyl tubing
- Lots of 5 minute epoxy
- Small pump- I used this one
- 2X nylon barbed T's, 1/4 inch
- 2X nylon barb to screw adapter, 1/4 inch
- Electric wire
- Electric tape
- USB cable
- Stock Athlon CPU heatsink
- J B Weld
- Small Motherboard Northbridge heatsink
- Thermal paste
- Spray paint for plastic, your color of choice
- Clear glossy acrylic spray
- Medium grit sand paper
- Laptop LCD hinges
- Assorted screws
- Dense 5/8 inch or so thick foam
- Masking tape
- Block of wax
- Modeling clay
- 3/4 inches of thin PVC pipe
- 6 inches of 1/4 ID 3/8 OD vinyl tubing

Tools:

- Hot glue gun
- Screw driver
- 2 clamps
- Rotary tool with cutting and brushing heads
- 6 volt battery
- Pliers
- Scissors
- Wire strippers
- Box cutter/ craft knife
- Drill
- Drill Press
- 5/16 inch drill bit
- Metal cutting oil
- Goggles
- Soldering Iron + solder

Comments

[Matrix-technician]

Thanks for the great ideas, I had read Jack's "ible" first then found yours. Both of these have got me thinking. My Dell 1500 runs hot enought to scald you at idle. Ofcourse this is of my own doing :p. I have been leeching max performance out of it's processor with a few hacks. The prolem with water cooling is size. And keeping all of the components concealed. I'm using a sink with a clip on fan from a 98 Dell, I have soldered a copper tube running through it in various places with a small 5 volt winshield washer pump to move the liquid. The fan runs on 5 volts as well, but my design is completely removable. Everything is powered by 2 of the 4 usb ports, and the unit secures to the back of the screen with velcro. The heat sink fins fit suprisingly well through the plastic cpu cover on the back of my computer, making it easy to slide on and off whenever I need it.

[mac7]

sounds like a great system, would make a good instructable in itself

[zack247]

here's just a thought, instead of having the foam pads on the bottom and worrying about tubes and hoses get some plexiglass or plastic and make a shell that screws onto the bottom of the laptop to keep it all concealed...

[isaaclo]

sweet hack...

[junits15]

what are the specs on that laptop?

[noingwhat]

Pretty cool idea, I wish I could do it, but I am not quite ready yet to cut a big huge hole in the bottom of my laptop. Too bad, my laptop overheats all the time and this would have been perfect!

[zack247]

theres no hole cut in the laptop, he just didn't put the cpu cover back on

[noingwhat]

Ahh... my laptop doesn't have a CPU cover, so I had just assumed that he cut a hole.

[noingwhat]

If you had your laptop opened up anyway, you probably could have just soldered the wires onto the USB jack, instead of making a plug for it and rendering the USB jack useless. If you did it that way, you would just have to be careful that you do not plug anything powerhungry into that jack, such as an ipod, or phone.

[Technochicken]

Slight update, I stuck in a new DVD drive a while back, and installed Ubuntu on this. The pump also got jammed for a little bit, but I pulled apart the loop and fixed that as well.

[SharonLovesCB]

6 year old laptop?? thats not old.. i still have a 10 year old laptop lying in my room..

[zack247]

10 years old? i have a 15 year old mactop

[Technochicken]

I used to have some that were about that old if not even older- they ran 250mhz pentiums and windows 95. The thing about them though is that there is absolutely no point water cooling them, as the produce pretty much no heat whatsoever.

[TSC]

Nice!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[hayden2908]

hmm I should try this with my dell inspiron 1150 =P it runs at about 65 degrees Celcius when idling lol!

[bombmaker2]

i have a dell inspiron 1100 and it run hot enough to burn you if it sits on your lap too long

[zack247]

acer travelmate 2300's arent very good either. where the cpu is, the laptop almost gets hot enought to melt the plastic! it's already distorting from the heat!

[lilpepsikraker]

lol same here. i have a 1100 and it gets to about 70°C under a SuperPI load, but about 58°C when i'm webbrowsing and listening to music.

[bombmaker2]

lol

[hayden2908]

 too late the CPu burnt out yesterday after the fan stopped working >=O

[bombmaker2]

that sucks. at least it is a cheapish laptop and not something like an alienware.

[zack247]

but alienware is top of the line. its never meant to overheat

[junits15]

Its not top of the line anymore bro :)  ever since dell bought them, they ahve started using cheap parts and have crappy customer service.

[zack247]

whaaaaaaaaaatttt?? i never knew dell bought out alienware! jerks, they got rid of one of the more usable computers! i have a dimension 4500, and hardly alive!

[junits15]

They aren't bad computers, they trick is to buy them low configuration and add in parts yourself, it saves money.

[bombmaker2]

I don't know about factory alienwares, but I forgot to mention above that my brother did custom build his computer. It is just an alienware case. And no it does not save money at all. My brother spent about $4000 a couple years ago to build his. Due to constant upgrades, computers almost always become outdated within a couple weeks of being released.

[bombmaker2]

well thats what dell does.

[bombmaker2]

Believe me i know my bro has one. but you never know i mean there could be a faulty fan that u don't notice.

[zack247]

ah, the erector set. i use those sets for everything except building toys. i use too much of that stuff in my computers, every custom or radical build i do has at least 5 pieces in it. (whether it be for attaching the fan to the heatsink, mounting te mobo, or even holding the entire case together!

[plokko]

you're absolutly crazy,watercooling a notebook is like a jet propelled car: it's cool but useless! cool but a little dirty work.

[sageserver]

really cool but looks kinda crude. install speedfan to see how much(in an actual temp) the water-cooling system works.

[Technochicken]

It doesn't look crude until you flip it over, but why would you need to do that? I've already tried finding the temps with speedfan and HWMonitor, but they won't detect the temp sensors. I've been told to try Everest, but first I need to reinstall windows, but the cd drive isn't working any more.

[Win7Maniac]

Yessss, extra sssspace! Yousss takessss outssss the cd drive and putsss more componentssss in! Yousss sstuffssss tubessss in there! :) Removing the CD drive frees up PLENTY of space! Seriously, I cracked open mine and you can put the pump and a bunch of tubing in there and still have a battery. Kool project, I like it. Pwnage. Ryan

[Technochicken]

Well, the dvd drive works (at least it used to), and the battery holds no charge whatsoever. Als the dvd drive in this machine is much too thin to fit the pump into.

[Win7Maniac]

Dang, u must have a kool DVD drive. Mine was GINOURMOUS. :)

[sageserver]

ok i see now. ur computer is old. 2 PS2 connectors and boxy style. What i mean by crude is that you used hot glue to connect the joints, and you made ur own waterblock(cool how you made it but...ya)

[Win7Maniac]

That waterblock is awesome, I've been wanting to know how to do that for a while! It's better to make it, dude, its custom.

[Technochicken]

Just to seal the joints. The glue doesn't actually hold anything in place.

[Win7Maniac]

String of logic: Does your laptop really have no heatsink already in there (like with a fan)? Yes, right? How is that heatsink secured? With screws? So aren't there screwholes? Yeah? So then you could, like mitchell12 said, make the copper a little bigger and screw the thing in? Then you wouldn't need the foam, and you could probably put the plastic cover back (provided you drilled holes for the tubes and it fits). This probably varies between laptops, but for most you could, right? Probably.

[Technochicken]

I answered this issue in mitcheel12's post. Putting screws in where the original HS/F was screwed in would put a hole straight through the water chamber in the water block. I circled the screw holes in this picture. Also the cover was missing when I got this laptop.