Laptop Overheats!

[fenrisx]

As the title says... my laptop overheats a lot. During the winter it would overheat when the wife and I would watch movies on it while laying in bed. It would be laying on the sheets, so I just assumed it was blocked air flow. We bought a thing for it to sit on, which seemed to do the trick. Well now that's it been in the 70's(barely into the 80s a day or two) it's over heating a lot. It doesn't matter if the air flow is blocked or not. The CPU part of the laptop will almost burn you it's so hot.

The computer has the following:
1.6ghz Celeron M
512mb ram

My question is this:
Do you think upgrading the ram to a reasonable amount will take enough stress off the CPU to help with overheating? I was thinking of maybe grabbing a gig, maybe 2, to throw in here. I could also buy a slightly faster Pentium 4 to put in here also. I just didn't want to throw too much money into this laptop. I'd rather just wait and pick up a new laptop with a Core i3 or i5 at that point.

What do you guys think?

[Okie81]

Memory and cpu shouldn't heat the system as much as a video or graphics card would, so I'm not sure if an upgrade will help with cooling.
Try some compressed air around the cooling fan, you might have a large accumulation of dust.

[Seanz0rz]

disassemble the computer and clean the fan and heat sinks. im sure there is quite a bit of dust and if you have pets, a small kitty's worth of hair stuck in the fan and heat sink fins.

upgrading will probably not help any.

[L33T35T Tacoma]

Another vote for blowing the laptop out. I had a Sony that was constantly overheating and got
to a point where it wouldn't even run. I took it to best buy complaining that it wouldn't run. Try returned to to
me days later saying they blew a lot of dust out of it. It ran great after that. Ever since I blow it out every couple months

[BruceTS]

Very common problem with laptops, I use mine in bed as well. You need to blow out the vents every once in a while, dust builds up fast in them.

[YotaFun]

Curious? what laptop do you have?
My HP which has long since past away,
actually had a bios update for the fan, too bad I didn't catch it in time and my warranty long since expired so....

Only reason i mention this is cause i could blow as much compressed air out as possible and take the laptop apart millions of times and it never did a thing due to the fact the motherboard was already on its way out.

just another option to explore i suppose

[CJM]

disassemble the computer and clean the fan and heat sinks. im sure there is quite a bit of dust and if you have pets, a small kitty's worth of hair stuck in the fan and heat sink fins.

upgrading will probably not help any.

Had the same issue, took it apart and was COVERED in dust you could only see from inside. I sprayed it with an airhose for a good 5 mins and got it all out. No more issues.

[Obi..]

Those porn videos will get you every time, buy a flatscreen for the bedroom.

I'll assume here that it mostly overheats when running a lot of programs simultaneously, video feed (youtube, etc) or videos.

IMHO..
It happens, period, no matter what brand of laptop, it happens. Simply b/c there's a lot for the cpu to be taking on.

That said, yes, clean it out, and pick up (or download) a fan app. I have an alloy cased mac, and even I run iStat and iFan to monitor the temps and usage. Consider looking at how you're also using the system, and what, if any programs can be put into shutdown as much as possible. Kind of how with the Mac you can change between Energy Savings, Normal, Better Performance, or Custom settings.

You don't need a portable laptop acting as a $2000 video player when you can get a p.o.s. Canon or Polaroid dvd player at your local Wally-World.

[Robinhood4x4]

It's a known problem for my dell inspiron 5100. The solution, as everybody else says, is to blow out the vents every few months. I don't have to disassemble mine, I just blow it out externally.

[fenrisx]

It's a Dell Inspiron 1300. I don't multitask with this elderly beast. The other night it overheated 4 times within 2 hours. What was I doing? I had a few Yota forums open in FireFox. Nothing else was goin' on. The only thing that starts up when the PC boots are the things necessary. I've got everything else unchecked in msconfig.

We have a DVD player in our room.. we don't have cable ran to the bedroom though so I always download he new episodes of House as they air. Those are divx as well.. not HD.

I'll take it apart tonight and clean 'er up. Hopefully that does the trick. I'll look into some fan control apps.

Thanks for the tips fellas.