Gaming Overheating problems...

[Forstride]

My laptop has recently started overheating and shutting down (It started happening a lot around mid-March of this year)...I'm not sure if it's just the fans/vents that need cleaned, because my laptop is on a desk in an open area (Middle of my bedroom), so it has plenty of ventilation space for the air it blows out. It's usually not hot in my room, and I usually have a ceiling fan on most of the time. Most of the time on my laptop, I'm just using Firefox or Game Maker 7, which really don't require a lot of processing power, so I'm wonder why it's overheating a lot...

Also, I'm not sure if this could have anything to do with the overheating problem, but my battery seems to have worn down and doesn't hold a charge for a very long time (I always have to have my charger plugged in, because the battery runs out after 30 minutes, where it would normally run out after a few hours on the Balanced power usage level).

Oh yeah, my laptop has one fan on the side, one fan (Unless it's just a vent) in the back by the charger port, and one vent on the bottom. They get really hot when it overheats, and I've actually gotten slightly burned by touch the plastic near the main fan once. I'm afraid something might happen to the internal parts, as well as the case for my laptop. Do you guys think I should get it looked at by a professional computer repair company, or is there a solution I can use by myself?

 

[Cermage]

them dust bunnies. get a can of compressed air and spray through the side fan/bottom fan. you should get a bit blowing out the other side.

after that get a laptop cooling pad, one with a fan at the right place really works wonders.

 

[Deleted member 35947]

Batteries eventually degrade with age and don't hold as much charge. I doubt it's related to the overheating problem.

Can you feel air being blown out of the vents on your laptop? If not, it's quite possible the fans are clogged up, or have failed. If you're not comfortable opening up your laptop to troubleshoot further, I would suggest you get another to look at it.

 

[Forstride]

Batteries eventually degrade with age and don't hold as much charge. I doubt it's related to the overheating problem.

Can you feel air being blown out of the vents on your laptop? If not, it's quite possible the fans are clogged up, or have failed. If you're not comfortable opening up your laptop to troubleshoot further, I would suggest you get another to look at it.

I can feel the air a lot when it's at it's peak of overheating, but when it's just warm, I can't feel it as much. The fans do make a lot of noise during it, so I know they are working.

 

[Originality]

Noisy fans typically means the dust bunnies are attacking it. As mentioned, compressed air does wonders, but it may also be useful to get a thin pipe cleaner and clean the really caked dust bunnies.

Whilst laptop cooling pads are always advisable, be wary about them. Half the cooling pads I've seen suck air away from the laptop, instead of blowing it onto it. Sometimes this helps (because it's sucking hot air out) but sometimes it makes things worse (if there's no air in the laptop, heat finds it harder to escape).

Something I noticed when I opened up my media laptop (to upgrade the CPU) - it didn't have any thermal paste on it at all! When I went ahead and applied it, my laptop suddenly became much quieter than usual. At first I thought I broke something, but it turned out that the laptop really was a whole 6-20 degrees C cooler (idle/load, respectively). That said, it's now a noisy laptop all the time, but that's just because I've been lazy and the dust bunnies keep coming back. EDIT: After half an hour this morning cleaning the fan, my laptop is nice and quiet again. In the process I lost one of the 3 screws for the fan shroud and the first time I turned it back on the fan just wouldn't spin, but it's working fine now.