StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Lately my laptop has been over heating and shutting down or the screen will go all messed up. I cleaned the vents on the bottom. What else can I do?

You could get one of those cooling pads (not really a 'pad, but I call it that) that you put your computer on top of. They have two fans and are pretty good at slowing down the overheating, although REALLY prolonged use will still cause it to overheat eventually. The one I use is made by Targus.

dragon wrote:Lately my laptop has been over heating and shutting down or the screen will go all messed up. I cleaned the vents on the bottom. What else can I do?

Did you use canned air to try and clean the vents out? If you did - the only other alternative would be to completely disassemble the laptop to properly clean the heatsink assembly.

Canned air to clean the vents. Also, update the BIOS. In a previous job I had a few cases where cooling systems weren't working properly because an early BIOS version did not hangle cooling fan management and other stuff properly, but the problem disappeared after a BIOS update.

Put it on a airing tray like you use for baking to let more air circulate underneath, inclining the laptop also helps.

I had a similar problem a while back and found a few group tests which suggested that not only are active cooling trays rather expensive they place more load on the laptop to power the fans which adds to overheating and if the fans blow in the wrong direction (ie working against the laptops internal fans) they make matters much worse. Consequently the group tests I saw recommended passive cooling products which is why I dug the old airing tray out of the baking cupboard.

I have my laptop propped up with a book under each side to ventilate the bottom and a desk fan pointed at it from the back. Otherwise, the thing overheats and shuts down in a matter of hours.

Most laptops have shit cooling schemes to begin with, and the older a model gets, the worse the heating problem will be. You're probably going to need some kind of external device to really solve the problem, in my opinion.

Had this same problem about a year ago. The fan/cooling pad option helps a lot, as well as turning your power settings to "Dynamic Switching" instead of max performance. I had to actually download a separate program for this (Notebook Hardware Control, version 2.0), which has been happily and quietly running in the background ever since.

Edit: Put in the wrong power scheme without thinking.