Why your laptop overheats

Lets face it, you hear a lot of people say that brand x made a crappy laptop that overheats. But the truth of it is that Dell, Toshiba, and others aren’t so crappy that they have mass produced overheating laptops. They test them a lot in their labs and heat is a major concern to laptop designers. Truth is that we cause our laptop overheating problems. We don’t always have very clean room for our laptop and they need constant airflow. We should really rename laptops to air cleaners because they suck in a lot of dust and your heat sinks act as filters. The next time your laptop is running really hot on your lap try opening it up

As in the picture above, your cpu heatsink will get clogged up. Your laptop’s airflow goes to nothing and the laptop will heat up on your lap until the thermal safety switch throw. Hopefully.  The problem is that the thermal buildup can damage a number of other components in the laptop. So before the thermal safety switch throws, the video card might have a chip burn up. Then our laptop stops working.

The next time your laptop is running hotter than it normally is, try opening it up and pull out the dust that is clogging the fans before its too late.