This morning I thought I'd clean out some of the accumulated dust from my PC at home. I've done this before, as I've noticed that the CPU's heat sink and fan particularly gets quite a covering of dust and lint, and I presume this isn't helpful in keeping things nice and cool.

Things were fine until I tried to lever off the fan that sits on the CPU heat sink. In prying it off, I also managed to unseat the CPU from its socket.

The problem is that the CPU has the heat sink firmly attached to it, and the heat sink is wide enough that you can't access the zero-insertion force lever on the socket.

Initial attempts to separate the CPU from the heat sink were not successful.

I'm confident that the hard disks are fine, though it is a bit tricker than usual as I had utilised the on-board RAID feature of the D865PERL motherboard to stripe two hard disks into one large disk. Because of this I'd prefer to get the CPU back and working rather than have to consider pulling out the hard disks and trying to get them to work in a different PC - even if it was the same model.

Anyway, now that I've got into work, I have found this useful article on removing and re-attaching the heat sink. I'll have another go tonight and see if I can have more success.