Laptop Overheating

[theburan]

So, I was sitting here, minding my own business, watching some Futurama on my laptop (which is running ubuntu 8.04 atm).

And then it shuts down, citing a critical temp exceeded (didn't catch what the temperature was measured from, although I assume cpu), and the threshold was at 125c.

This struck me as odd, to say the least. None of the fans died on me (I turned it on just to make sure, the fan was spinning up faster than I had ever seen, and boy, that was some hot air.) The thermaltake thermal pad I had it sitting on (an ixoft) didnt help much, since the battery keeps the base of the laptop elevated a few centimeters (and I just now realized that it isn't do much good for the computer that way).

I'm just confused as to why it got that hot in the first place... I'm not sure the fan was even spinning up when it shutdown.

Odd, to say the least.

sudo end--rant

[Hitman]

Could be some dust build up combined with the rising summer temps. I would blow it out, and change the thermal paste.

[Parker]

Originally Posted by Hitman

Could be some dust build up combined with the rising summer temps. I would blow it out, and change the thermal paste.

My thoughts exactly. Well said.

I recently took apart my Mac mini after a couple months of usage since the last time I took it apart. The reason was because I had noticed that temps were higher than they were before.
I found a ton of dust build-up on the heatsink, blocking airflow.
So I blow it all off, put it back together, and the temps went back down some.

Dust is a system builders worst enemy.

[Badluck Inc]

Same thing happen with my Dell 1300 . Was running really hot and would shut down , cleaned out the heatsink and put new paste on and runs fine now.

[theburan]

That's the thing, it's running fine now, without doing anything besides restarting. For some reason the fan just didn't want to spin up that one time, lol.

I have a temp monitor running in the toolbar now, just to be safe.

Been running nice and cool (for a laptop) since then, lol.

Stupid gateway.

[azianai]

i'd blast some compressed air into the vents and put a vacuum hose at the other end to suck up all the dust bunnies. If you have the service manual, you can take apart the notebook and clean up all the stock thermal gunk and apply some good TIM on it.

[garetjax]

Originally Posted by azianai

i'd blast some compressed air into the vents and put a vacuum hose at the other end to suck up all the dust bunnies. If you have the service manual, you can take apart the notebook and clean up all the stock thermal gunk and apply some good TIM on it.

Compressed air is expensive I have found. I (carefully!) use a leaf blower rated at 180Mph and it does the job quite well. =)

[Hitman]

Originally Posted by garetjax

Compressed air is expensive I have found. I (carefully!) use a leaf blower rated at 180Mph and it does the job quite well. =)

Yeah cause a leaf blower is so much cheaper then a can of compressed air.

[Parker]

Heheh.... my dad has a 250gl air compressor in the garage I can use.

[garetjax]

Originally Posted by Hitman

Yeah cause a leaf blower is so much cheaper then a can of compressed air.

You're assuming that I bought a leaf blower just to remove debris and dust from my computers. The fact is that I've owned my leaf blower for a couple of years now for yardwork duties. Besides, have you tried using a can of compressed air to blow leaves off your driveway?