Laptop over heating? One for the techies

[ibelieveinmrreeves]

Right, apologies for this as there must surely be a thread on the topic but its easier to start a new one I've noticed for a while now my laptop gets abnormally hot, but dismissed it as nothing as my brother in law said it was normal, and I can usually trust him on these matters. But its baking hot and has just shut itself down - whats most likely to be the cause? I'd take a guess at a broken fan somewhere but I'm really not sure. If I get some ideas from here its a starting point.

[BANGKOK RED]

Have you tried blowing on it?

Asides from that, from my experience it is very likely that a fan is broken.

[Chubbs]

Can you hear the fan? I suspect its just covered in dust and not working as effectivly

[axs]

full of crap or bust fan at a guess.

[Simon Pieman]

If the fan wasn't working at all it'd shut down within seconds.

More likely to be a combination of dust and dirt in the heatsink (the copper pipe thing which dissipates heat) and dried up thermal compound.

[Simon Pieman]

Oh and in case spacey is reading, you need to buy one of these

[Barry Scott]

Go into Bios and check the temperature of it. Ideally it should be under 50'C in my opinionated opinion, although i like 'em under 40'C and once ran one at about 80'C although it did die once i got it to over 95'C. Surprisingly.

[jayohaitchenn]

any amd chip will happily run at just over 60'C.... for a while.

[ibelieveinmrreeves]

Right, I checked everywhere in bios and saw no temperature (I checked and found it ok on my parents pc) so i downloaded this piece of software called Sandra. Looks a bit clever for me but I figured out how to get it to monitor the temperature. Seems to be running at a steady 55c. Seems a little on the high side (!). I've reported it to ASUS and will go from there.

Thanks to all.

Edit: It's up to mid 70s. Fucksake.

[LucienSanchez]

I had this problem the other month... turns out the casing around the fan had bent in when i moved house and was stopping the fan from doing its thang. Bent the casing back into shape with a screwdriver, and hey presto...

[Simon Pieman]

How old is the laptop? If Asus want to charge you to have it fixed and it's not that new you could try and use a vacuum cleaner over the air vents to suck the dust out. There is a risk of a static charge ruining it though, so take that into account, but jjedmunds says he does it all the time and has never had issues.

Or I don't mind taking a look at it if it's convenient. No point in paying asus for a clean and if it's the fan that's broken it should be a cheap and simple job to fix.

Your other option is to get a laptop stand with fans built in which will keep it cooler.

[ibelieveinmrreeves]

I bought it in August last year, and it came with a 2 year warranty so it ought to be covered. Its just the hassle of sending it away, etc. Anyway, I opened it up and the fan seems to be working ok. I do wonder if Lucien Sanchez might be on to something though - I tend to transport my laptop quite a lot so I'll check that out.

[Simon Pieman]

Did it look quite dusty around the fan?

[Talk Talk]

Did it look quite dusty around the fan?

I used to have a girlfriend who was like that. Dermatitis I believe.

Anyway - I would go with Si on this one. Stick a Hoover nozzle in the fan aperture. My laptop had a similar problem, it was turning off more and more often. I even bought a cooler for it. Eventually it got so bad that I took it apart and found a huge wodge of dust inside the fan outlet/heatsink (not visible from the outside). It works fine now.

[Peter Venkman]

I used to have a girlfriend who was like that. Dermatitis I believe.

Anyway - I would go with Si on this one. Stick a Hoover nozzle in the fan aperture. My laptop had a similar problem, it was turning off more and more often. I even bought a cooler for it. Eventually it got so bad that I took it apart and found a huge wodge of dust inside the fan outlet/heatsink (not visible from the outside). It works fine now.

Are you sure "wodge" is a cromulent word?