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[i2amroy]

Alternatively buy yourself a can of compressed air, open the laptop up,  and give it a good blowing out (note, hold the compressed air can vertically right side up, else you can spray liquid air on your computer and damage it). Lots of times the heat problem is just from the accumulation of dust which when cleaned out fixes the problem.

Also while disassembling your computer sounds scary, it's remarkably easy to do. Just make sure you have a set of small screwdrivers, a clean table to work on (and possibly something to hold the small screws) and then follow the instructions here until you feel you've disassembled it enough to get all the dust out.

[MaximumZero]

Also, be very careful with the case so that you don't pull any ribbon cables off the motherboard. Some of them are a real bitch to get re-connected.

[Arx]

So. I have a laptop which is the cheapest thing one step above a netbook, but is probably slower than most modern netbooks.

Pertinently, it has 2GB of RAM. This means that running Windows 7, Firefox, MS Word and MS PowerPoint all at the same time is enough to reduce it to continual freezing. Task manager informs me that I'm near-constantly at max RAM usage and almost never above 50% CPU; with nothing running except all the standard Windows processes, it's at over 50% RAM usage.

I assume at this point another gigabyte or two of RAM will be useful? It's a 64 bit system, so it can certainly address that much.

[Aklyon]

The more important question would be can it change the RAM in the first place?

[Arx]

I have an easily accessible empty RAM slot. It's just a question of getting the right type of RAM (I'm pretty sure I can do that) and if the RAM will actually help. I'm pretty sure it would, but I thought I'd check before sinking a few hundred currencies into another gig or two.

[Aklyon]

It certainly would help it not be frozen, I'm pretty sure most laptops have at least 4gb for that reason.

[wierd]

some laptops double as space heaters.  I had an amd athlon based one a few years back that could probably be used to bake cookies with the right attachment.

using an aftermarket cooling pad can help tremendously.

[PyroDesu]

I have an easily accessible empty RAM slot. It's just a question of getting the right type of RAM (I'm pretty sure I can do that) and if the RAM will actually help. I'm pretty sure it would, but I thought I'd check before sinking a few hundred currencies into another gig or two.

By all means, stick another 2 gig stick in. Or a 4 gig, or whatever you can afford. Not doing so means your computer is probably using bits of the hard drive as psuedo-RAM (which would cause the freezes), and that's not very good for disk life, as well as being slow. Nowadays, I'd say 4 gigs is probably the minimum, if not for operating at all, then for operating well. More RAM will increase performance further (to a point), but 4 is serviceable.

[wierd]

windows ALWAYS uses swap, even when ram is free. (linux wont, and IIRC, OSX wont either, as long as sufficient ram is available and the swappiness value is set sanely.)

The only way to keep it from happening is to put gobs and gobs of ram in, then actually disable the swapfile completely.  Windows will complain mightily if you do, but that's what you have to do.

[Aklyon]

Some games wil also crash without warning if you disable Swap, on top of the mighty complaining of windows.

[flabort]

Speaking of spaceheater laptops, mine reached the 99ºC point today without shutting down, but had it gone up just one more degree, my computer thinks it's a great idea to blackout; if I didn't monitor the core temperature via Afterburner, it would be without warning.
The thing is it reaches the 100ºC mark almost every time I use it. That's the temperature water boils. And simply running something small, Windows Media Player comes to mind, as do DF, Team Fortress 2, Civ V, Minecraft, Spider solitare, etc. will increase it's temperature from 60º to 80-101º.

I've asked my dad for help opening the case to blow out the fan, but he hasn't responded positively to the request yet. Nor do I have access to compressed air, and the computer doesn't even start the fan until it reaches 90º.

I've even tried using power-settings to limit my CPU's processing speed to about 40%, and while it delays the overheating by a minute or two, it actually seems to be the GPU producing most of the heat and other problems; I can't access it to slow it down through control panel.

[alexandertnt]

What's the GPU? NVIDIA GPU's with Optimus should let you set it up so programs use only the integrated GPU. AMD GPU's might have something similar, but I don't really know anything about them.

[Sappho]

Quick software question: Does anyone use Icedragon as a browser? I started using it as an alternative to Firefox a while back, but now I'm starting to get warnings on web sites that my browser is out of date. I have frequent glitches with flash, especially on Youtube. I checked the updates for the browser and it says it's up to date. Does anyone know if it's going to be updated anymore, or will I have to abandon it and go back to Firefox?

[Sensei]

Speaking of spaceheater laptops, mine reached the 99ºC point today without shutting down, but had it gone up just one more degree, my computer thinks it's a great idea to blackout; if I didn't monitor the core temperature via Afterburner, it would be without warning.
The thing is it reaches the 100ºC mark almost every time I use it. That's the temperature water boils. And simply running something small, Windows Media Player comes to mind, as do DF, Team Fortress 2, Civ V, Minecraft, Spider solitare, etc. will increase it's temperature from 60º to 80-101º.

I've asked my dad for help opening the case to blow out the fan, but he hasn't responded positively to the request yet. Nor do I have access to compressed air, and the computer doesn't even start the fan until it reaches 90º.

I've even tried using power-settings to limit my CPU's processing speed to about 40%, and while it delays the overheating by a minute or two, it actually seems to be the GPU producing most of the heat and other problems; I can't access it to slow it down through control panel.

Is it a dell laptop? A friend of mine had a dell where the thermal paste kinda dried up and became less effective after a couple years of use and over the course of a couple months it went from "runs really hot" to "overheats and shuts down shortly after loading windows". It was really dusty, but only replacing thermal paste solved the issue. Towards the end before we tried new thermal paste, he was running it with the bottom of the case off, propped up with a desk fan for cooling.

[Thief^]

the computer doesn't even start the fan until it reaches 90º.

That's not great. Try checking the bios settings to see what temperature the fan is set to run at, or even disable fan speed control altogether (which should make it run at full power all the time).