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[Reudh]

So, earlier this year, I bought myself a moderately powered laptop for uni, as I need to be able to access some CPU/GPU intensive medical programs. Lately, as we're heading into warmer weather, it's overheated a coupla times and kicked in its failsafe... yesterday, once, today once.

So I loaded up CoreTemp, and it gave a reading of TJMAX=95C, MIN=95C, MAX=95C
Now, that couldn't be right, so I looked it up- apparently my motherboard and CPU don't properly report temp to CoreTemp. It's just an issue with the cpu.

Onto specs!


Toshiba Satellite L950
-AMD Vision A8-4500M "Trinity" APU, 4 core @ ~1.9ghz, sometimes 2.8ghz turbo, but that's not common
-8GB RAM, don't know which kind, presume DDR3 or whatever the latest one is
-AMD Radeon HD 7640M + 7610G dual graphics, 1GB hardware memory (DXDIAG reports as "4096MB total memory", but I assume 3GB of that is software memory)

I presume that it's the CPU's issue - on the laptop itself, only one side gets really hot, and only when the following happens:

-The computer is plugged in to the power
-The computer is running a CPU or GPU intensive game
-Ambient temperature in the room is above ~27C

It's clicked off its failsafe with the following:

-Team Fortress 2
-Civilisation V
-Guild Wars 2
-Left 4 Dead 2

Surprisingly, Dwarf Fortress hasn't - i guess that's to do with the fact it's single threaded and runs on only one core?

In advanced power options, I set the CPU to throttle to 90% power when plugged in, but that didn't help.

Any ideas? I suppose I could get a cooling mat.

[Andrew425]

I use a bunch of old paint cans which I balance my computer on top of. Using the edges of textbooks works as well. As long as you can get the computer a couple of inches of the table then most of your problems should go away

[SOLDIER First]

I usually have my laptop ~on~ my lap, so I can't help with elevation solutions, but I usually unplug it for a while and it cools down a little.

[Bdthemag]

Cooling mats do jack shit for anything more than minor heat problems and definitely won't help with the CPU. You can either open the laptop up and clean it out, removing any dust/debris (If you haven't done this yet, you'd be surprised how much junk gets sucked up in there.) or consider getting a tube of thermal paste to replace the no doubt shitty and dried up factory paste on your CPU. If you're not familiar with how to open up the insides of your laptop or are worried you'll fuck something up, just look up a guide for your specific model since they're pretty much everywhere.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

My laptop went from hot enough to burn me to perfectly cool by removing the dust. 99% of heating problems are dust. Dust.

[Reudh]

Thanks, I'll give that a try. My house is fairly dusty, what with being on a slab and everything. The old laptop never overheated, even on 45C days, but that had a far weaker CPU. And yeah, thermal paste should help, but i'd rather clean out the fans and vents first.

[Carnwennan]

I have a Toshiba Satellite too. It was running at an average of 80 degrees on cold days, and would overheat if I tried to play anything remotely demanding. It was running 95 playing terraria ffs.

I sprayed a can of air around the fans, watched this huge plume of dust escape, turned it back on and it was running fine at like 40 degrees.