Over heating problem

My laptop is six years old. It has never crashed until now. It still gives one hour power back up. However, over heating is my main problem. How do I handle this issue?

 

You can buy one of those external laptop cooling racks. Old laptops have this problem because either their fans are underneath or to the side, placed clumsily. Such engineering flaws make the laptops hard to use. So, use the laptop cooling rack, keep your laptop on top of it, and then you will be able to use it well.

Also, you may want a lighter operating system so that the cpu doesn't work as hard.

 

You could see if the fan is broken, mine started to overheat at around that mark, and it was the fan. I still use it, but I had to buy a new one, because the thing kept turning itself off in the worst moments. I use the old laptop for short periods of time when truly needed. You should check your laptop, and if it's really worth it replace that fan.

 

The first and most important thing you need to do when your laptop is overheating, is to clean the fan/s that provide/s cooling to the CPU and graphics card.Over time they build up layers of dust and dirt that slow them down and block flow of air.

Keep The Laptop On A Hard & Flat Surface. Laptop coolers are meant to provide additional cooling. However, getting the wrong cooler can actually make the problem worse. Before you purchase a cooler, you need to understand the flow of air into and out of your laptop.

 

I have been studying about External cooling for Laptops for some time and I have learnt that most of them are of no use. You are simply wasting power and energy over false claims done by these cooling companies. The best thing you can do is to try to underclock your CPU by 100MHz and reduce the brightness.

The major problem with overheating is obstruction of the air outlet in your Laptop. Never use your Laptop on a soft bed or pillow as this will make the problem worse. Try replacing Old Hard Disk Drives with newer SSD's as it will help a lot. Also, Clean the CPU fan if you are familiar with opening up your Laptop. Good Luck.

 

Do not use the laptop on a sponge surface. It should be on a surface that can allow it to breath such as a desk or on your lap.
Also try not to open a lot of apps all at once. The apps are the ones that cause the overheating.

 

I used the cooling fan under my overheating laptop. It worked for a short time but it used up my power very fast. I find that giving your laptop a long rest helped, and use the air can to blow out some obstructions in the back helped also.

 

I used to have a desktop in the office but when I was assigned to 3 offices, I was issued a laptop for my official use. It was noticeable that my laptop is heating after 30 minutes of use. When I reported it to the dealer, they said that it is normal. But after a week, I realized that there is a problem because the laptop gets too hot for comfort after 1 hour of use. And I was right. The technician found out that the hard disk is the one overheating. Since my laptop was a replacement of my desktop so I had to migrate the files that took me a week. And continuous writing on the hard disk caused the overheating. After changing the hard disk, my laptop is working fine.

 

This is a pretty common issue. You can do several things. First thing you should do is check out your laptop's CPU and GPU temperature to get an idea of how much it overheats during normal use. Another thing would be to uninstall all unnecessary software from the laptop.
One of the easiest and most efficient way to solve this problem is to buy an Air Duster Spray to get the dust out of the fan from the outside. They are cheap and you have several website options to order them if you can't find them where you live. You take it and gently spray the dust out through the sides of the laptop where you can feel the airflow.
Lastly you can disassemble your laptop and clean the fan and everything around using an ear stick or something like that, very gently. However, if you feel like you could not do this or are scared to screw things up don't do that.
Good luck!

 

You are correct. You only get between 5 to 10% cooling gains if lucky, and it's never enough to keep a system regulated let alone cool. And because you're using the usb port to power it, it runs down the battery faster. So there's two reasons not to bother with it.

You're also right that reducing the brightness helps (less power to the LCD = slightly less stress on GPU and video card being used = slightly less heat), and making the processor run less by underclocking it can help some in those situations since that too helps to reduce how much heat is generated to where any thermal grease or cooling/heatsink component can distribute the heat out more rapidly to keep it cooler that way.

Also right on the SSDs. SSDs don't use nearly as much power as magnetic drives since 'there's no motor to start and keep running, which causes additional heat build up on its own and compounds temperature issues. Years ago, I saw that using a ram drive made it possible to still use some systems which overheated and found that the temperature difference by not having the magnetic drive running was just enough to make it keep running when heat was an issue with a system fan not working or air flow not being enough.

One additional thing you may want to do is to reduce the amount of programs that run at startup, and how many processes run in the background. This too, will help to keep the amount of CPU usage to minimum levels and help to control heat build up to where you can use the laptop for longer periods of time.

An optional method I used to use too was that if I had an isue like this, I would put my entire laptop in the freezer part of my refrigerator for 20 to 30 minutes before using it. Why? The heat build up has to fight against the cold temperature that is now several factors lower than room temperature. By dropping the temperature lower than normal when powered on it will take at least 10 to 20 minutes longer for it to reach the same hotter temperatures as before, giving you extra time to work on a system which can be very important if you're trying to retrieve data from it without any other means to disconnect the drive or run it externally.

On another thread, I mentioned that you can use the "box fan" method to keep a laptop or desktop without the right cooling fan or air flow from shutting off. It has to be positioned correctly for air flow from a box fan to replace the function that the normal system fan used to do, but it will work. You can try turning up the air conditioning in the office if you are allowed to, although this may make too many people cold if it is an office full of other people.

The other methods or the box fan may be your best bet, but I would do that in conjunction with all of the methods mentioned by others and by myself on this thread for best resuts and to keep it as cool as possible for you.

 

power backup is also my issue thus, I cannot use cooling rack/pad with my laptop. Will it help if I replace the inbuilt cooling fan in my laptop.

 

If you're able to take it apart easily to clean out dust and repair the fan, then that will usually fix any malfunction of it overheating due to a bad fan if you have a new fan to replace it with. Adding thermal grease to keep it cooler would be a good idea too as long as you have the case off and access to the board.

 

Yeah. Thermal grease is also something that degrades after about 3-4 years,so you can try adding thermal grease. The cooling racks don't always require power though, they're just built to absorb heat, even if for some reason you lose power. However, you won't be able to carry the cooling rack with you wherever you go.

 

Have you ever cleaned the fan? What about from the inside? And after that you can change the thermal paste. That's how I saved an old laptop of mine.

 

Download a software called gpu-z and with this you can monitor the temperature of your laptop. 80C for your GPU and 70C for your CPU should be the limit up to which no damage will really occur or happen. If it crosses that, then it's time to open your laptop (by someone professional) and do a little bit cleaning and a little bit application of thermal grease just like one of the above poster said.

 

It could be that the your CPU cooler is full of dust and isn't working as well as it should. The fact that your computer already is a bit old and you are probably running programs that are heavier then they were some years back, probably pulls more out of your CPU. That in it's self will make your laptop run hotter.

 

I think I will have to start with uninstalling all the programs that are installed in my laptop. For instance, I have iTunes however, don't use iOS device. Why should have this program? I also some couple of video editing programs. I will try to keep the best program and remove other programs. Air Duster Spray is a good idea. Thanks

 

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I've already recommended this a couple of times on other threads, but I'll say it again to give a heads up to anyone who'll read this in the future. More often than not, cleaning the fans and exhaust vents of your laptop solves overheating problems. But if your laptop is quite old (3 years or more), then that might not be enough. You have to resort to replacing the thermal paste of both CPUs and GPUs. That, however, requires you to completely disassemble your laptop which voids your warranty, so make sure you know what you're doing! It is indeed a hassle, but it will almost always fix overheating problems, so it's definitely worth a shot.

 

Yeah and if you're lucky like me, all you have to do is take out your keyboard and you'll see the dirt on your fan. I just vacuum it all out and sometimes use a shaving brush (i know that sounds crazy but it has soft thin bristles) to get rid of tougher particles. Works like a charm.