hot laptop

[rain_masquerade]

So, laptop has decided to start overheating.

The fan is going mental, it's so loud you can hear it from two rooms away. Stupid Asus, having a ridiculously small fan vent. It never did this when I first got it, which was xmas last year (I think. Might have been birthday.)

Anyway. I've got it on a cooling pad on my desk, it's got plenty of space, I'm only running Firefox and MSN (plus background antivirus), and it's still getting hot as fuck around the touchpad and keyboard above the battery. Battery itself feels cool to the touch, probably because that's where most of the cooling pad's airblast is centred.

Is it possible the fan is choking on something/the vent is clogged? Anything else that might be causing it? Hints/suggestions/etc would be awesome.

[nalgas]

Is it possible the fan is choking on something/the vent is clogged? Anything else that might be causing it?

It certainly is possible. Over time, the insides of computers tend to get full of dust. Open one up, and the older it is, the grosser it'll be. Usually the vents are too small to let hair or stuff like that in that would actually get tangled in the fan, but the fan blades and most other surfaces will eventually get plastered with really gross dust. It's not normal fluffy dust like you find on a shelf. For some reason it's kind of sticky and cakes together, whether it's because any non-sticky particles just blow out the far end or it builds up a static charge or something. Whatever the reason, it's nasty stuff, and it only gets worse if there are people who smoke around or other sources of particulate crap in the air.

However, unless you use it in a particularly dirty area, it generally takes a good deal more than a year for that to really be an issue. If the CPU is in constant heavy use, whether it's because there's other crap running on your computer that you're not aware of or because people make really miserably bad websites that cause your browser to use tons of CPU time, it'll make your computer get toasty in a hurry. Same is true if the power management stuff got disabled somehow so it runs at full speed (and therefore high temperature) all the time instead of slowing down when it's idle.

[rain_masquerade]

Hrmm... Well, now that you mention 'particularly dirty area'. I do have two cats, which means cat hair. That might be a culprit?

Power management's still enabled, and I've checked all the processes and such. Far as I can tell, the only things that are running are the things that should be.

[grousemouse]

if you can get free servicing on it then by all means do so. otherwise you could get a can of compressed, liquified air and blast it at the vent and see if dust gets blown back out. if it does, keep doing it.

i sometimes run boinc on my laptop and that runs both cpus at 100% so things get quite hot. my solution was to take a metal cookie tin lid and rest the laptop on that in my lap. the metal acted like a heat sink and helped cool the system.

ideally you'd take it apart and blow dust out that way but not everyone's comfortable with that.

good luck,

grouse.

[rain_masquerade]

dianthus - Oh, good point. The place I bought it from sends them away for assessment/service though, so I'd be without a laptop for awhile. Can't afford that at this point :/ Also, I have to find the warranty docs to confirm it's only a year old. For all I know, it could be two. I have no sense of time.

But yeah, that's definitely an option if I can't fix it on my own.

grousemouse - I might try the compressed air thing, as long as there's no chance of causing damage (I'm paranoid). I need to do that to my keyboard anyway, it's time for a clean.

And yeah, I wouldn't be comfortable taking it apart to clean the fan. It's underneath all the other important circuitry and knowing me, I'd destroy it.

[pinkiemarie]

Ok, I've had issues with laptops before where the vents have gotten totally clogged (I have 3 cats, but even if you don't have any pets there is still dust and hair and other particles that can find their way in there). It could be as simple as just needing to clean it out, or you might need a new fan, but either way I hope that fixes it. Those are much easier to deal with than other problems that can crop up on a computer!

*EDIT* Oooh, I need to read all the relevant posts before answering. Cat hair WILL do it. And cat dander. And cat anything lol. Also, if it is just a fan or a dirty vent, you're probably looking at $100 tops to fix it out of warranty. If they try to charge more than that they're probably ripping you off.

[rain_masquerade]

Haha, it's not enough for them to cover my room with their fur and clog my washing machine filter and season my food with hairs, they have to attack my laptop as well

Ok. I'll try cleaning out the vent and see if that fixes it. If not, I guess it's time to rummage through the ol' filing box and hope the warranty docs are in there someplace, lol. Because I'm not game to open the laptop and try and clean the fan myself.

[nalgas]

You may want to look for an application that reports both CPU temperature and fan speed. I don't know what's available for Windows for that.

I use Everest for that, which has a free trial version. Not sure what's good that's totally free and not complete overkill like that, though (it also does about eight million other things most normal people have no use for).

[r2mnot]

Awhile back I had a laptop that did the same thing. I took to to a small (One dude) PC repair & sales place. He took it apart and cleaned it up while I waited. It took him about half an hour and he charged me around twenty bucks.

Oh, I backed everything up first.