Fan and radiator issues

For the last few months, I’ve been dealing with this frustrating issue where my three-year-old HP Pavilion laptop starts running its fan at such an intense speed that it creates this heavy buzzing sound—it actually gets to the point where the whole machine feels like it's vibrating. I haven't really noticed a pattern, though; it doesn't seem to trigger specifically when I'm running anything demanding on the RAM or the graphics card. It just happens seemingly out of nowhere. Usually, if I shut the laptop down and let it sit for a while, the noise disappears entirely, even if I restart it immediately. It stays quiet for a day or two, maybe more, and then the fan goes crazy again. A few months ago, this would happen every couple of days, but lately, it seems to be happening every single day.

So, I finally decided to try and clean out the fan myself. I opened everything up and managed to clear out a pretty significant amount of dust that had built up inside, but unfortunately, that didn't help at all. In fact, things actually seem to have gotten worse; now the fan runs at maximum speed constantly, making that same loud, vibrating noise that makes it almost impossible to use the device 😬 I was wondering, is it possible that this is being caused by dried-out or worn-out thermal paste? I actually went ahead and detached the heatsink assembly from the CPU and GPU, but since I didn't have any new paste on hand—and to be honest, I hadn't really heard much about how important that part is until now—I just put it back together without applying anything new. Is it possible the hardware itself has just failed, or am I looking at a thermal issue?

It’s not vibrating because the thermal paste is old or dried out. That’s a myth. The issue is the fan bearing is shot. It starts shaking once it hits a certain RPM or hits a specific resonance point—that's why it feels random sometimes. There isn't some magic fix here; you've gotta swap the part out and refresh the paste while you're at it. Honestly, factory application can be pretty sloppy sometimes, causing the whole rig to overheat. That forces the fan to crank up the speed, which just wears it down even faster. It’s a vicious cycle. Plus, you know how it goes—someone takes their laptop to bed, sets it on a comforter, and suddenly the vents are sucking up lint and dust. Now the airflow is choked, the fan works overtime, and boom... total meltdown.
Since you already pulled the paste, the situation is actually worse now. Even if the old stuff was degraded, it at least filled the gaps and moved heat along. Now? There’s nothing there. You need to get that fixed ASAP, especially with this summer heat hitting. If the cooling is trashed, you're looking at some serious hardware damage...