HP Pavilion dv4165cl Upgrade and Cooling Mod

I came upon an old HP Pavilion dv4165cl (see here for specifications).

The owner loved the old computer but it was having a serious problem it would shutdown after a few minutes of work. I decided help out and take a look. If I was lucky it would be an easy fix and make someone happy and it would also save someone a lot of money.

I want to apologize in advance for the blurry pictures but my camera and I weren't getting along and I was having trouble focusing.

The HP Pavilion dv4165cl was generally in good condition. The battery wouldn't hold a charge but all in all, it was fully functional, except for the overheating issue.


First things first, flip it over to see if it had easy access to all the necessary components: memory, hard drive, CPU, etc. To my astonishment, the CPU had it's own bay! I opened it up to find that the heatsink assembly was COMPLETELY clogged with dust.

I cleaned up the dust straight away and took out the heatsink to see what was going on with the thermal paste. Wouldn't you know it, not a whole lot going on there either. On top of it all, there was this aluminum like tape on the bottom of the heatsink. I pulled it off and spent a considerable amout of effort cleaning up residue.

Since I was already at it, I decided to pull the rest of the computer apart to see if the video card processor or other chipset chips need some additional help with cooling.

I found no thermal compound on the nVidia GPU, so I added some Artic Silver 5 (I got my tube from amazon.com here) and a copper shim (generally I use 0.5mm thickness copper shims, but get a variety pack for the odd jobs and a pack of the 0.5mm copper shims for general use here from ebay.com) and additional Artic Silver 5 to the top of the copper shim and the part of the aluminum cover that made contact with the copper shim to help with heat dissipation. Additionally, I put a piece of thermal pad (I use this particular thermal pad for all my cooling mods) over the chipset chip for good measure. I know on occasion those things over heat.

Last but not least, replaced the thermal compound on the CPU and heatsink assembly.

I put everything together, reinstalled Windows XP and used Hardware Monitor to monitor the system temperature all night while playing video files and music files. The minimum temperature of the system was a cool 44 C and maxed out at 79 C. The system never shutdown or rebooted so I would call this a successful cooling mod.

Post cooling mod, performed the following updates:

• Upgraded BIOS to latest BIOS
• Downloaded latest drivers from hp.com here
• Reinstalled Windows XP SP3 - the owner liked Windows XP. What can you do.
• Preinstalled essential drivers and updates

Additionally, I recommended the following upgrades/mods:

• The battery bay latch was broken and found that the little plastic hook holding the spring on the inside had snapped off. I used Mercury Adhesives M1100 (buy it here on amazon.com) and Accelerator MH16 (buy it here on amazon.com) to reattach it. Believe me, M1100 WILL NOT break. This fix is PERMANENT.
• Memory upgrade from 1 GB to 2 GB (get here from crucial.com)
• The hard drive is PATA so if going to SSD, check out mydigitaldiscount.com for 2.5" PATA SSDs.
• The HP Pavilion dv4165cl has an Intel Pentium M 760 2.0 GHz processor. From what I can tell it looks like you can definitely upgrade to the Intel Pentium M 780 2.26 GHz processor. Not sure how much further you can take it, but it's a start.