Slow and overheated laptop

[charlie009]

Hey, I purchased a dell inspiron 1525 almost 3 months ago.

It has:

4gb ram

intel pentium dual core processor (1.87 ghz)

32-bit vista home premium.



My computer has been overheating alot. It starts to go a little slow. so i feel the air next to the fan and its scorching hot. Could this happen becuase i have too many programs running? or does my computer have too many files saved on it? i tried to defragment, but it said my preformance was ok and that i didnt need to defragment. i also tried deleting alot of my junk files, and erasing all my cookies. it still seems to overheat, i was just wondering how i could fix this?

P.S. is overheats even when i allow air to circulate under the laptop.

 

[Supadupar]

It will most likely be overheating because the heatsinks are blocked with dust/lint/etc. I've had this problem with my previous Toshiba P30 laptop and had to take it into a service centre once a year to have it manually cleaned out. This would be your best bet.

I ended up getting a Toshiba L300 and it hasn't failed on me yet and it's a dirt cheap laptop in comparison with others (I do my DJ'ing on there) and you can grab a good deal from www.notebookcity.co.nz (where I got it from). The only thing is that you cant play good games on it die to the inboard GPU.

 

[setishock]

I know this thread has some mileage on it for the benefit of others that may be having an issue like this one, here's some thing else to consider.

Laptop is a misnomer. If you hold a laptop in your lap or if you're in the rack and it's laying on the covers, you're blocking the air flow in to or out of the laptop. Same for having it on the arm of the couch as Buzz at CV found out.
I've seen beanbags with a hard top made just for using a laptop at Office Depot. That was a while back. I've used a cookie sheet in a pinch. Minus the cookies of course.
Anothe thing as the OP pointed out not only was it getting hot but it was slowing down. Throttling back is built in to cpu mobile and desktop systems for that matter. When the CPU gets over heated it is designed to slow down on purpose. This is a self defence scheme. When the chip cools down a simple reboot will let it come back up to speed.
Bottom line is when you use a laptop be aware of the vents.

 

[metin]

Just to add to setishock, if you really want to keep your laptop cool, you might want to get laptop fan coolers.