Black spray (?) on a laptop's heat sink assembly

Posted by arnehehe on Super User See other posts from Super User or by arnehehe
Published on 2013-11-12T16:20:52Z Indexed on 2013/11/12 21:57 UTC
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Filed under:

laptop

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cpu

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hp

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fan

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cooling

We have a HP Pavilion DV3 4000SB that was given an error on startup that the fan was having problems (System Fan 90b error message)

So I decided to open the laptop up and clean the fan, as that seemed the easiest option. Upon opening it up, at first I froze and thought "No wonder! The whole thing's burnt!", but then I started thinking it looked more like someone used a spraycan on it.

I looked up a video on youtube of someone disassembling his Pavilion and noticed there wasn't any of the black on his, so my question here is: Have any of you encountered this, or know what it is? Or if it's something that could point to a problem?

Photograph of the heat sink

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