Laptop Heat

[Prancing Minstrel]

Hello, I've had my laptop over a year now, and if I'm doing anything active like dungeons in WoW I've noticed the area around the mouse pad and the base gets very hot, I ignored it but a week ago my laptop overheated for the first time. I bought a cooling stand, and the base of the laptop is now consistently cool, but the area around the pad still gets hot. Is this likely to cause problems, or is the base where the more important stuff tends to be?

I'm worried that I might be cooling the area which measures the temperature and tells the laptop to shutdown in emergencies, so if it is still too hot I could be doing damage and won't know.

[Hanto]

Happens to me a lot. I got the Coolmaster U2 cooling pad. It has two fans you can put anywhere on it so it sucks the air specifically from the hotspots of your laptop... I just got it setup right the other day. It still runs about 65c-70c (just checked with Coretemp.. 84 holy crap). Not sure what to do once it's hitting those extremes and it still shuts down however. Mine has yet to do that.

... yikes, 92c. >< Didn't realize it got this hot from just WoW.

[Deleted]

I think it has to do with dust in the fan as well. When i had mine repaired a while back, they had also cleaned out the dust in the fan and it worked alot better for a while, the laptop remained cooler for a lnog while.

[ambigiouslynamed]

examine the bottom of the laptop, where are the outlets? are there fans visible anywhere? u can try moving ur hand around the thing to see where the heat comes from and direct a fan there

[Nalnik]

When was the last time that you cleaned the fans on your laptop? If a year's worth of dust and dirt has clogged them, that might be the cause of the overheating.

A cooling pad might help treat the symptoms, but a good cleaning should "cure" your problem.

[Prancing Minstrel]

examine the bottom of the laptop, where are the outlets? are there fans visible anywhere? u can try moving ur hand around the thing to see where the heat comes from and direct a fan there

Heat comes out from near the top right corner of the side, I suppose I'm going to have to try and work out how to open up the case to give the fan a going over with some compressed air, I wasn't expcting to have to with a laptop.