Want To Prevent Your Laptop From Overheating? – Follow These 5 Easy Tips!

Don’t you hate it when you are working on an important project on your laptop, and it suddenly slows down or freezes? Or worse, it reboots without you having saved your latest edits. You look at the poor machine worryingly and try to figure out what went wrong, or you flip out and start banging the keyboard. We have all been there, and we know all too well how it can disturb our seemingly peaceful lives.

While there can be several reasons behind the above issues, more often than not, they are a result of your laptop overheating. Laptops are getting more advanced and packing more features than ever with each passing day. Manufacturers are stuffing them with loads of RAM, powerful GPUs and CPUs, and unimaginable amounts of storage while designing them to be ultra-sleek and portable.

But, while many of these laptops claim to have the best cooling systems, the problem of over-heating still plagues them.

Thankfully, there are some workarounds that you can follow to prevent your laptop from getting too warm. 

In this post, we have listed five ways by which you can mitigate, if not entirely eradicate, the issue of your laptop’s temperatures going over the recommended numbers.

Prevent Your Laptop From Overheating With These 5 Tips:

Overheating not just decreases a laptop’s performance but also poses a threat to its longevity. Thus, to ensure that your laptop stays cool, you need to abide by certain best practices and relatively simple fixes. Let’s look at what they are.

1. Ensure That Your Laptop is Well Ventilated

If you own a laptop, you are used to placing it on your bed or couch while working. And why not?

But you should understand that your bed or couch is not the ideal surface for your laptop’s ventilation as they block the air coming out of your laptop’s bottom grills.

Laptops cool themselves by drawing in outside air (using fans), letting it absorb the heat generated by its components, and throwing it out constantly. When the bottom of a laptop gets blocked due to being placed on an uneven surface (bed or couch), it becomes difficult for the fans to draw in enough air to dissipate heat. Thus, the heat stays inside and raises the laptop’s temperature.

To avoid this, place your laptop on an even surface, such as a table, to prevent suffocating its bottom.

2. Regularly Clean Your Laptop’s Dust

Most laptops don’t come with a self-cleaning mechanism (at least not yet). So it is up to their owners to clean them.

The insides of a laptop are prone to get clogged due to dust and other pollutants. Thus, you should open up your laptop once in a while and do a thorough cleaning. Make sure to disconnect any power cables and peripherals before doing so.

If you can’t do the cleaning on your own, take it to a service center. They usually charge a small fee and do a more than satisfactory job of making your laptop spick and span. They might even throw in some external cleaning for free (if you’re lucky).

3. Get a Laptop Cooling Pad

If you live in an area where temperatures cross the bearable mark regularly or if your laptop has a compact chassis that does a poor job of keeping away the heat, or if your laptop is getting hot even after cleaning and placing it on a flat surface, you need to buy a laptop cooler.

A laptop cooler is a device that goes under your laptop and cools it down using its built-in fans. Laptop coolers are relatively cheaper and a must-have for laptop owners. A lot of these coolers also come equipped with LEDs that make them look super-cool (pun totally intended).

4. Get Your Laptop Checked For Any Faulty Components

Sometimes, thoroughly cleaning your laptop, ensuring it is well-ventilated, and placing it on a cooling pad is not enough. It still heats up and irks you more than it helps you with your work.

If you are facing a similar predicament, chances are, one of the laptop’s components – either the harddrive, the GPU, the thermal paste, or the battery – is at fault here. This calls for an inspection of your laptop, singling out the faulty component, and replacing/fixing it. If you can’t do it on your own, your friendly neighborhood service center will do it for you.

5. Avoid Placing Your Laptop Under the Sun or in a Hot Environment For Too Long

Most electronic devices work best when they are placed in their ideal temperature ranges. And laptops are no exception.

Laptops typically perform well when their surrounding temperatures lie in the range of 10-35 degrees celsius. Any more or less than this can cause a dip in your laptop’s performance.

Thus, you should not place your laptop directly under the sun or in a hot room that’s not well-ventilated. This also implies that if your laptop gets too hot and you are looking to cool it down fast, DO NOT PLACE IT IN THE REFRIGERATOR. Doing so will cause a sudden temperature drop, and your laptop’s internals might get severely damaged. Instead, shut it down and wait for it to cool off.

Conclusion:

Laptops become more prone to overheating as they age. Hence, no matter how many precautions you take, if your laptop is fairly old and has served you well, it will cease its operations one day.

If you don’t want to see your old buddy give out due to the stress of running daily, your best bet is to retire it and go for a newer model. And when you buy a new one, don’t forget to follow the above tips to keep it running for a long time…!!