My lovely girlfriend has had an Averatec notebook computer for about a year and a half, and it has functioned just fine up until the last two weeks. Now, if one works on it for more than about 20 minutes, the bottom starts getting really warm. Like, it isn’t very comfortable to sit on your lap kind of warm.
When it gets hot, the computer’s fan is running constantly, so it doesn’t appear that the fan has conked out. I have a hard time describing where the heat is centered, but it seems to be the underside of the computer, not particularly near the battery. (We pretty much always keep the computer plugged in, very rarely use battery power.)
There haven’t been any heat related problems, like the computer shutting down or anything like that, but the temperature is quite unusual.
Any ideas on whether this should be taken seriously, and if so, what might be the culprit of this new heat source?
I have no idea, but I have Google Desktop on my computer and have a panel on it called HDDlife that measures the temp of the hard drive and warns if it gets too hot. I don’t know how useful or accurate it actually is, but it might give you some idea if you need to worry. I also know you can buy mats that sit under a laptop and provide cooling.
I’ve had this very problem. In my case it was due to heavy dust buildup around the fan and vents. I powered it down, then used a can of compressed air and just blew out a bunch of the dust, and used a straightened paper clip to (very carefully!) pull out dust clumps from the fan intake. Be careful that you don’t spin the fan too hard with the air you are blowing in, I heard that can damage it.
After I did this it was back to normal, and I just repeated the canned air cleaning every month or so. Hopefully your problem is this simple to fix. Good luck!
Am sure that my extreme heat build-up had to do with a long-haired white cat, but a laptop cooler did the trick.
After the initial cat-hair removal, the guys at CompUSA sold me a laptop cooler that does the trick. It’s a small unit that fits right under the laptop, maybe about 1/2" inch high, exactly the same size as the laptop. There are three fans that cool the laptop above it. It works beautifully and I think it cost me about $20.00.
My hot laptop experience resulted in a sunburn type effect on my thighs that took a few weeks to go away after purchasing the ‘cooler.’
When I bought my brand new laptop I couldn’t even keep it on my lap because it felt like it would burn your legs because of how hot it got. I called the company and told asked them if there way anything wrong with it and they said basically that it was normal for it to be that way and that I shouldn’t use it on my lap if it gets that hot. They stopped calling them laptops and started calling them notebooks for a reason.