How to cool your laptop

Laptops are generally more prone to overheating than desktop computers, as you may well have discovered, and there’s nothing more annoying than an overheating laptop. Symptoms of overheating include the underside getting very hot, the internal fan coming on more often and being loud, and in extreme cases, the computer switching itself off, freezing, crashing, or rebooting. If you want to know how to cool your laptop, below are some ideas and methods that you can employ to keep your laptop cool and prevent overheating. However, if your laptop is freezing, crashing, shutting down, or rebooting due to overheating, you should maybe consider jumping straight to my article on cleaning your air vents and fan: how to fix laptop overheating.

Where you put a laptop when you use it is important. Ideally you want a hard, flat surface to put it on. If it is resting on a pillow, or on the carpet, the air vents underneath can be obstructed and impair the fan’s ability to keep the CPU (central processing unit) cool. The laptop is also more likely to get dust and fluff inside it if you put it on the floor. Despite their name, your lap is generally not a good place to work on your laptop either. If you’ve nowhere convenient to put it and are worried about your laptop overheating, you should seriously consider buying a stand for your laptop, there are many well-designed, effective, and competitively priced products on the market nowadays, including laptop stands such as the mStand Laptop Stand By Rain Design.

If your laptop gets really hot, it will shut down or try to reboot. This is to protect the CPU (central processing unit) which is a core part of the laptop (and one of its more expensive components.) If the laptop regularly shuts down, freezes, crashes, or reboots because of overheating then you will need to clean the fan and the air vents, otherwise you risk complete meltdown! You can try blowing compressed gas through the air vents using a compressed gas aerosol duster which is designed for use with electronics to unblock them. But to clean your fan you will need to open up your laptop. Read my article: How to fix laptop that is overheating before you attempt this.

Other ways to cool a laptop include placing a fan nearby that blows cool air towards the laptop and using your laptop in a cool room or space. Also try to keep the laptop out of direct sunlight when working on them, as well as hot enclosed spaces such as inside cars.

You may also want to look at the workload that your laptop is handling, if you want to avoid an overheating laptop. Graphics can be especially taxing for a laptop to handle, so be careful gamers. Make sure also that your power management is set at its most efficient, you need to keep to a minimum external devices plugged in via USB and the screen brightness should not be set higher than you need.

As I mentioned at the start, laptops are more prone to overheating than desktops, so don’t assume that your laptop can handle as much use and abuse as your desktop. (This applies to notebooks too). It is usually a good idea to rest your laptop now and then, rather than using it constantly for long periods. If you are unsure about how hot it is getting, you can also monitor the laptop’s temperature using a program such as SpeedFan, or HeatShift by Thermapak.

The best idea though, if you are serious about trying to keep your laptop cool, might be to look at buying one of the really cool devices on the market nowadays that are specifically designed to cool your laptop, such as a cooling stand or a cooling pad.