How to Prevent Laptop Overheating and its Causes

Everyone want to keep laptop with him every time. That is the reason companies trying to build more and more compact laptops.

With advancement in technology GHz speed, efficient cores, more ram and even more powerful GPU becomes the primary requirements.

Now a days people are using multitasking and working on laptops for longer duration. But older laptops become very hot very soon.

They can’t work for long duration and if more resources used they become hot in seconds.

I observed my laptop becomes very hot while rendering videos and playing games.

People can’t find out the ways how to prevent laptop overheating. Overheating may damage your laptop’s important components, crashes and even data loss.

So if you want to keep your laptop safe and don’t want to lose files. Just follow me as here I will show you how to prevent laptop overheating and keep your laptop cool.

Causes of Laptop Overheating

There are many reasons for laptop overheating and every heating problem in the notebook can be fixed or prevented.

Dust in the vents

One of the most common or you can say major for overheating is dust. Dust is everywhere and over time it can easily get inside anything which includes laptops.

Laptop vent is a very important part that release heat that is generated by the CPU and GPU and if the vents or fans are covered by dust then cooling efficiency will reduce and eventually the laptop will start overheating.

Thermal paste on CPU/GPU

Thermal paste is used just over the CPU and GPU to transfer generated heat to the heat sink which helps them to coot it down.

However, effects of thermal paste overtime can be weakened and transferring of heat to the heat sink will be less efficient, resulting in overheating in laptops.

Hardware Problem FAN/CPU/GPU

In some rare cases, a defect in CPU/GPU or its fans can also cause a heating problem in laptops. Sometimes hardware can cause overheating.

Extra heat can be generated in laptops if CPU or GPU has defected or Fan is not running properly/Slow RPM.

How to Prevent Laptop Overheating

If you are working to solve laptop overheating then you can use a temp. monitor software.

There are many CPU temperature monitor tools which can tell you about temp., fan speed etc.

Even these tools can tell you about which process is causing overheating.

Software like Core Temp, speed fan can work best for you and give you real time monitoring.

With software you can check if your temperature is going above 70 degree Celsius or Fans is running with abnormal speed.

Clean fans and vents

The first and most important thing you can do when your laptop is overheating is to clean the laptop vents and fans as these are the main things that help your laptop to stay at normal temperature.

As mentioned one of the major issues of overheating is stuck dust in vents and fans, so by cleaning fans and vents, you will improve your laptop cooling efficiency. Thus, it will fix overheating in laptops.

How to do it?

In order to clean the laptop from inside you must watch a video on how to open your laptop.

But remember if your laptop is in warranty, opening your laptop may void its warranty, so if you are facing heating problem and laptop is in still in warranty take it to its brand service center.

After opening the laptop use a soft brush to clean the vents and fans. Then check your temperature after closing your laptop.

Change your Fan

It may sound ruff but sometimes fans can also cause a heating problem when there are running slow, clogged or working abnormally.

In that case, we recommend you to buy a new similar fan that matches your laptop model as defective fan repairing is not easy and replacing it with a new one will do the job.

How to do it?

As mentioned earlier, opening laptop may void your warranty, so be careful. You can change your fans by yourself easily just by watching a video on YouTube.

Unscrew your old fan from your laptop and replace it with new and be careful when you’re attaching fan wire to the motherboard.

Reapply Thermal Paste

Degenerated thermal grease (aka thermal compound) can also cause overheating in laptops as heating needs to be transferred from CPU/GPU to heat sink so that fan can cool it.

Thermal grease over time can lose it effectively. Thus, can cause overheating in laptops.

How to do it?

You can easily buy a thermal paste from your local laptop or PC store. Remove the heat sink from CPU/GPU and remove the old paste and apply a new one on the CPU/GPU, all you need is just a tiny drop.

Applying thermal paste is not a child’s play, applying more then you need can also cause ineffective heat transfer from CPU/GPU to heat sink.

How to prevent your Laptop from overheating in future? 

Always use your laptop on a flat surface instead of thigh or bed, use a lap desk. Clean your laptop vents and fans after 3-4 months from inside and regularly from outside.

And also, use a cloth to cover your laptop after using it. Try to avoid intense processing in a laptop as 100% load on CPU for a long time can cause heating as well.