Laptop Overheating Causes

Also

Cause 1: Laptop overheating due to physical sources. A carefully designed laptop on the manufacturer's part would normally prevent instances of laptop overheating. For such designed laptops, the most frequent cause would be blocked air vents.

The air vents are designed to dissipate heat, and blocked vents would cause the opposite and build up heat. Take some time off to clear the dust built up at these vents for a smooth air flow.

Cause 2: Laptop overheating due to software malfunction. For every laptop system, there is software which carefully control and operate the cooling fans, normally located within the BIOS. In most cases, upgrading the existing BIOS would solve the problem.

The overheating problem might also occur after upgrading your operating system (OS). Most softwares are written to be run on a specific OS. You might need to upgrade these softwares to compliment your new OS. This might be a problem if the model of your laptop is being discontinued.

Cause 3: Laptop overheating due to faulty design. As we know, new processors are now faster than before. The number of transistors being packed into one single processor is increasing, thus creating more heat.

usually its just bad ventilation in conjunction with heavy processor usage, eg. CPU vent on th bottom of the laptop and trying to play something like Crysis, terrible example but you get the idea; i hope ^.^

firstly, what make was it, some are known to overheat you might have had something against the fan or the fan was failing, due to dust or time

I had the same problem with my old laptop. All I did was clean out the exhaust vent.

I took the plastic cover off and removed the blower fan unit and I found that it was clogged full of dust.

I just got some compressed air and blew it all out. You could use a vacuum or using a small paint brush to lift the dust out.

The temp of the CPU before got up to the 90C's and I used to have a desktop fan running on it to keep it cool, now it runs at about 40-50C which is near perfect :)

Hope this helps, Dan.

http://gamecityonline.co.uk

Some one's off the top of my head are: Very Intense applications, like games, Keeping your laptop on a a blanket, were the fans have no room to ventilate the computer. Fan malfunctioning, Use in direct sunlight/ hot room. Sorry, can't think of more right now.

Use a Giottos air rocket (on amazon for about $10) (what they use in photography to clean the lens) and clean the heatsink in the laptop. This is virtually the #1 cause to overheating...

BTW, DO NOT use Pressurized air cans, as water (condensation) can come out (from time to time) and you'll be in a lot of trouble when water spits out.

Monitor your temperatures.

also clean the laptop heatsink regularly. in order to keep production cost and size down, laptop makers use heatsinks that are only able to keep the CPU and GPU a few degrees below their overheating temperatures at full load.

Over time as dust builds up on the heatsink, cooling ability will be reduced and now at full load your system will overhead.

You must clean the heatsink every 2-4 months (depending on how much you use it) A vacuum cleaner and the host attachment pressed against the bottom vent is generally enough to get most of the dust out (if you leave the dust there too long, it will cake on and you will need to remove the bottom panel and manually clean the fins)

you don't want to end up with your laptop heatsink like this