Laptop gets really hot then turns off, suspect it is overheating. How can I reduce this?

Question

My laptop keeps overheating and turning itself off. Underneath it gets really hot.

Even playing 3D online poker is impossible, it just overheats. If it is on my lap, I try and balance it so it's sitting just on my legs and has loads of free space under it. This seems to help a bit (it's never turned itself off in this position) but even being on a desk can result in it overheating.

There is a lot of dust, etc that I've cleaned it out (as much as I can easily take apart anyway), but it never used to happen. Any ideas?

The laptop is a Lenovo 3000 N200.

Answer 1

Consider a laptop cooling pad:

Sorry, but I couldn't resist!

Answer 2

I had this problem a lot with my Toshiba laptop. I tried blowing out the dust and that didn't work. I tried a cooling pad, but it gets really annoying and severely limits portability.

What I did was to take it apart, replace the fan (which I think may have been faulty, it certainly had a lot of dust in it), remove the CPU, remove the old, dried up thermal grease, and apply new, high-quality, silver-based thermal grease.

Since then, I have not really had any problems with it. It only overheats after many hours of intense usage, compared to about five minutes before.

Answer 3

You could try Undervolting your laptop.

Undervolting is a corollary of overclocking. Overclocking involves running a chip faster - and possibly with higher voltages - than specified to get more performance. Undervolting is running a chip at the same speed but at lower voltage which means less heat and longer battery life.

I'd had success using RMClock to do this. I followed this guide.

Answer 4

Check out this article in the lenovo forums. It gives some suggestions based on your model. As Molly recommends, get a cooling pad so you don't burn your lap.

Answer 5

I too had the same issue with my N200. I bought a cooling pad from Belkin on eBay at a very high price, but even that didn't work, it was still shutting down even corrupting my data.

The cooling pad cooled down the laptop not considerably though, but I tweaked some settings in the Power Saving panel and in Desktop Properties – reduced the brightness and all that. Now it's somewhat better.

Actually I found this technique here only, but it somewhat worked for me, you should also try it!