Question : Problem: Cleaning thermal compound off processors

I have had trouble with my Brother-in-laws Computer. It worked fine when I first built it but over time it started locking up randomly often freezing during booting. I though the symtoms seemed to imply some kind of hard drive / controller problem whereby the system was crashing due to loosing connectivity with the SATA hard drive. I took the computer to the company where I bought the components but to do the testing (free of charge at lest) to see if either the motherboard or hard drive was faulty I had to dismantle the computer and leave them with the motherboard and hard drive to test. They did not find anything wrong with it so I have tried to build the system up again. I have plenty of experience with building systems. Unfortunatly when the system was dismantled origionally some of the thermal compound from the processor got on to some of the processor pins. I have done my best to clean it off using some pure alcohol and cotton buds (Q-Tips) as well as some flossing items. There does not appear to be any thermal compound short circuiting the pins but there are still remnents off it. Some compound got on the processor socket too from when I first tried to put the processor back in and before I noticed some compound had got on the pins.

Ultimatly inspite of my cleaning everything and putting it back together the system is not initialising. I really hope nothing is permanently damaged but if anyone has experience with this kind of problem and has tips for cleaning thermal compound off processor pins I am open to suggestions.

Answer : Problem: Cleaning thermal compound off processors

Use a toothbrush dipped in alcohol.  The fact that you got it on the pins is probably an indication that too much paste was being used - you only need a tiny drop, and you have to spread it paper-thin over the cpu's contact surace with the heat sink.  Remember, the paste is there only to displace tiny air gaps; most of the heat transfer is through the metal-to-metal contact.