Is my laptop idling hot?

Using CoreTemp, I find my laptop’s CPU (core i7 740QM) is idling at about 73 degrees on all four cores. (By idling I mean that’s the temperature after about five minutes of me not doing anything.)

Is that too hot?

I ask because I believe my laptop is overheating. When I play a game (basically any game), after a while (usually quite a while, but occasionally not) my comptuer will simply shut off and if I turn it back on before ten minutes or so have passed, then it immediately blue screens. Sounds like an overheating problem, right?

I’ve unscrewed the panel and checked for dust but I literally see no dust whatsoever. Neverhteless, I’ll buy an air can and see if I can blow out some dust from the fan area that I’m simply not seeing.

If that doesn’t work, I don’t know how else to solove this. There’s another layer of panels I could remove, under the layer I already removed, but there’s about a hundred (well a dozen) screws involved and I believe this is probably a much more touchy thing to treat for dust than the simple fan-and-hard-drive areas I can more easily look at. But if I have to, I have to…

One thing I do is–I elevate the thing using folded up slips of paper, so it’s about three quarters of an inch higher off the table than it would be without the slips of paper. That should be helping in theory, right?

Very ignorant follow up questions:

If I set a fan to blowing towards the space under my laptop (of course not towards the laptop’s own fan vent) is this likely at all to help keep it cooler?

Also, really silly idea here probably, but can I conduct some heat away from the laptop by placing the right kind of object on the area of the laptop that tends to get really hot?

(BTW the temperature is 72 degrees not 73 as I said in the OP.)

Oh yeah, that’s hot. You want to aim for about 40 deg C, but you probably won’t get quite that low on a laptop. I’d be happy with about 50 to 55 on a laptop.

What type of CPU is it? Most laptops these days have “mobile” CPUs which are fairly low power and shouldn’t overheat like that even if they are squished in a laptop and are running heavy apps.

You might want to go to the laptop manufacturer’s web site. A lot of laptops have a fairly easy way of getting to the CPU in case you need to replace the CPU fan. You may not need to undo the hundred screws and figure out the Chinese puzzle to open the box.

ETA:

For your follow-up questions, they do make laptop coolers that you can sit your laptop on. They help somewhat, but if you have a fan or ventilation problem inside the laptop then a cooler probably isn’t going to help enough.

It’s a core i7 740QM. Some googling seems to indicate that people find it does run hotter than people were previously used to before the introduction of the chip. But I’m finding no consistent specification as to what counts as normal and what counts as hot for this particular chip.

Intel’s specs for that processor indicate that it can pump out 45 watts of heat. That’s a bit on the high end for a laptop, though I have seen higher. You should be able to get the temperatures down into the mid 50s or so.

Intel specs the max temp at 100, but that’s the temperature at which the thing will die a very quick death. If it’s in the mid 70s at idle it’s probably getting up into the danger zone while running hard.

is it truly idle, though? If you go into the task manger does the CPU really have a lot of idle time?

I’ll check in a bit–right now it’s hovering at 3% usage but I’m running something right now.

Frylock: I suspect that ECG has things well in hand, but I would like to ask if this has always been a problem since the lappie was new or has it developed recently?

I ask because laptops tend to have pipes to direct the air flow and they can get clogged much more quickly than a desktop’s heatsink. This is doubly true if you have a pet or pets.

If at some point you think you need to go to the next level, would calling tech support be an option. I know they are the butt of many jokes and often deservedly so, but sometimes they can be helpful.

I use a laptop cooling pad that plugs into a USB slot. It keeps the laptop cooler.

Mine used to idle hot, then I found the Samsung printer utility (Mac) was using almost 100% CPU.
My friend’s HP used to overheat, he used to blow a fan at it, them changed to using a vacuum cleaner to suck out clumps of dust.

nm

If you use a vacuum to clean out dust from a computer (or other electronics) make sure you use one that is designed for the job. A normal vacuum cleaner generates a lot of static and and kill electronics. They make special anti-static vacuum cleaners just for electronics.

You can also buy cans of compressed air to blow the dust out. The can will usually have a straw that you can attach to the nozzle so you can direct the air into tight places like heatsink vents.

I haven’t had a chance to look more into this yet, but I wanted to note that for some reason, irght now it’s just sticking around 55 degrees.

I do not see any difference in what processes are running or anything like that.

Never mind the last post–it’s actually climbing up by about a degree a minute.

Have you checked to make sure that the cooling fan for the CPU is working ?

Even if the vacuum is outside?

OP: maybe you can try ending all processes and seeing the temp.

Yes. Last week I was working on a laptop that was overheating because its internal fan had completely stopped working, and in the meantime we were able to cool it nicely with a personal external fan blowing on it.