Ringlord Technologies News
Laptop Overheating?
![[ringlord]](img/ringlord.png)
Back to Ringlord Technologies News
December 10, 2004
A little tip for those with laptops that are a bit older, and may have some trouble with the slab overheating and then shutting down unexpectedly or with a dire warning before all goes dark: clean out the fan & radiator assembly as soon as you can! Heck, do it every six months the way you'd change the oil on your car, and your laptop will live much longer.
Here's my story, for what it's worth:
I've a Sager slab, Northwood Pentium 4 running at 3.067 GHz and for the past six months this beautiful beast has been having serious overheating problems. Just running the CPU at full capacity for ten or twenty minutes could have the thing go through an emergency shutdown. Nasty!!The culprit, as I suspected, was dust: Both fans were working just fine, but I did notice that they were going a million miles an hour almost all the time, working very hard trying to keep the slab cool. Just how much dust was in there and just how much of an impact that made, I found out only after I finally opened the thing up:
Careful of the heat. The fan & radiator assembly is hot and can easily give you a serious burn if you're not careful. I disconnected the two-fan affair, took a deep breath, and blew hard into the exhaust end of things. Cloud of dust, floating dust bunnies, and here I sit, still coughing from it. Just be sure to keep a finger on the fan(s) to prevent them from spinning as you blow, as spinning them violently could damage them. I gave my lungs a good workout, reassembled the thing, and now the slab runs at least 10°C to 15°C cooler than it has been! I've not been able to push it past 63°C even at high CPU usage, where before it would quickly leap to 75°C and work its way up from there. (80°C is the max before it forces itself off).
And that's not just good for me and my work, but great news for the longevity of the CPU.
Just passing on something useful for a change ;-)
All content is copyright © Ringlord Technologies unless otherwise stated. We do encourage deep linking to our site's pages but forbid direct reference to images, software or other non-page resources stored here; likewise, do not embed our content in frames or other constructs that may mislead the reader about the content ownership. Play nice, yes?