First time disassembling PSTwo (SCPH-70004). What to look out for?

[Shadow_Zero]

I traded for this silver PSTwo with a friend a few years ago (it's not my primary machine). Recently one of the memory card slots doors came off, so I decided to open it up and have a look. Unfortunately a tiny piece of plastic has broken off from the case, which held part of the spring mechanism in place, so I don't see an easy solution there (perhaps getting a new case, not sure if that's easily available nowadays).

Since the console seemed kinda noisy I thought I might as well disassemble it completely and have a further look, plus figuring out if this was a V12 or V13 machine.
Since there are so many revisions, it took a bit of searching and comparing to find a guide that was applicable for this console, but ifixit has a very nice one: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/PlayStation+2+Slimline+Teardown-Disassembly/9694

Some photos I made: https://imgur.com/a/lhloLsB

So, what I learned today (https://www.reddit.com/r/ps2/comments/oil2a6/comment/h4yc5vd/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) is that both V12 and V13 have the separate EE+GS and unified EE+GS. Mine seems to be a V13 with separate chips (GH-032-32).

I see a lot of dust in the fan and a bit on the mainboard and heat sinks (not sure if the metal enclosure functions as a heat sink actually...). So I'm thinking a vacuum cleaner on the fan and compressed air for the board and the rest, plus qtip and alcohol where necessary. Anything else I should consider?

I also read suggestions of replacing thermal pads. How can you see if that's necessary?

Anything else maintenance, or perhaps modding wise? I still have a modbo chip lying around somewhere, but I'm not sure if I'm comfortable soldering that myself. A sd card solution would be neat too, but waaay out of my skills

[kendrick]

Specific to your question about the thermal pads? The ones that Sony used in the PSTwo manufacturing were pretty cheap and disposable, and anecdotally it's been observed that they aged poorly and degraded quickly. There's no real visual indicator of whether or not they've gone bad, which is why there's the general recommendation to replace them generally.

With that said? I've never replaced any and haven't seen the need to. The components that generally fail in PS2 slim units are the moving ones, like the DVD laser and the hinge parts as you've seen yourself. I feel like the PSTwo benefits more from external cooling (like a full-surface laptop fan) more than any internal cooling improvement. Take that with the appropriate grain of salt.