4.1 Tips To Prevent Your Laptop From Overheating
"These days I am in trouble because my Dell Vostro 3500 (i5) gets heated up very soon and suddenly shuts down.
What should i do to prevent my laptop from overheating?"
This question was asked by Avinash Mishra, a friend of mine from MakeMeNoise.com.
Hello Avinash. In this post, I will try my best to solve your troubles. I hope these tips will prove helpful to you!
Today, personal computers and laptops have undergone much development. Development in their hardware, their performance, battery life and much more. But one basic problem that still troubles a laptop user is - heating.
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Specially heavy gamers and laptop users who run resource intensive applications face this problem a lot. And just like Avinash, many laptops abruptly shut down with any small or large software bug, to prevent any hardware damage. And eventually overheating of laptop results into hardware damage as well.
So what to do to prevent your laptop from overheating?
Let us have a look at some measures you can take to prevent your laptop from overheating.
1. Use A Cooling Pad
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A cooling pad is a laptop accessory manufactured by most of the major laptop companies. A cooling pad consists of some kind of gel which absorbs heat radiating from a laptop. This would not stop the laptop from generating heat but will help you in decreasing the temperature caused by the heat.
Though it is not a free solution but it is a full proof method to prevent your laptop from overheating.
2. Place Your Laptop On a Proper Surface
Be sure that you never place a laptop on a soft surface like pillow or bed.
Why?
Because a soft and flexible surface can easily block the ventilation of your laptop. And it is the ventilation that is responsible for the removal of most of the heat produced in a laptop. Heat would get trapped in the laptop's hardware and will directly result into overheating.
Similarly, make sure that you don't place your laptop on a surface where your laptop's ventilation gets blocked.
And do not ever tape your laptop's ventilation holes!
Try to place your laptop on hard and even surfaces where air can easily flow through the laptop.
3. Clean Your Laptop Components
One of the main reasons of an overheating laptop is dust.
That's right. Dust gets accumulated on the surface of your laptop components and can result into excessive heat generated by your laptop.
One easy method to get rid of dust in a laptop is the use of compressed air.
Once in a while, safely open up your laptop and clean your laptop's components like fan and processor chamber. Make sure not to harm anything, just clean up the dust gently. For this, use of a can of compressed air is easiest.
A clean laptop is a clear solution to prevent your laptop from everheating.
4. Sacrifice Your Processor Performance To Reduce Heating
I read this method a while ago on addictivetips.com and I give full credit to them for this.
They have suggested a method which involves reducing your maximum processor state. This will reduce your laptop's processor performance a bit, but at the same time results into a decent control in heat produced by laptop.
Open Control Panel > Power Options
Now go to Change Plan Settings > Change Advanced Power Settings.
Expand Processor power management > Maximum processor state
Reduce the values of 'On battery' and 'Plugged in' to something like 85% and 95%.
This would help a bit in reducing the heat produced by your laptop. But also keep in mind that this technique will decrease the performance of your processor also. Make sure you don't over-decrease the settings or you will face performance issues.
4.1 Limit Your Laptop Use!
If nothing works, then limit your laptop use such that your laptop doesn't reach the overheating limit. Whenever you feel that your laptop is producing excessive heat, try shutting down the laptop and keeping it idle for a few hours.
Let your laptop rest because the foremost reason of overheating is over-use.
Did I miss something?
Hey Avinash!
Was this post helpful? Do let me know.
And hey everyone else! Do you have any other tips to add here? Do comment and share your tips here!
