Today I was fed up with our NUC acting super janky. A game we have played often on this same platform had been stuttering heavily at random times after a RAM stick had failed. This brought us from 8Gb total down to 4Gb. That kind of failure was a first for me. We received a replacement 8Gb stick to get the old ram pair entirely out of the device and went forward with playing. The stutters we’re definitely lessened but I wasn’t convinced it was just a RAM issue.

So I decided to break down our NUC. There was plenty of dust in the fan and cooler fins, but I found that the factory installed paste looked pretty crusty. This isn’t to say that it wasn’t doing its job, however I figured if I was already this deep I should just replace the paste anyway. It definitely helped that I had some laying around. So far after cleaning everything up, reapplying, and booting up we haven’t had any stutters since. It doesn’t hurt to try some DIY to fix your own issues.