Laptop overheating is a serious problem, not only can it reduce the performance and lifespan of your laptop but it could also cause you serious personal injury.

The problem is that as manufacturers pack more performance into portable computers, the amount of heat generated increases drastically.

In this guide I’ll give you some ways to make sure that your laptop runs cool and quietly.

1) Ensure Adequate Ventilation

Perhaps the most obvious step you can take is to make sure that your laptop has good airflow around it.  I’m not suggesting that you stick it in the cross breeze of a desk fan or hang it out the window, but it’s important to make sure that any air vents are kept clear.  The vents are positioned to allow cool air to be drawn into the laptop and expel hot air, blocking either vent will prevent heat being dispersed effectively and cause the machine to warm up.  Blocking the intake will also make the fans work harder as they struggle to pull the air in and will therefore make them louder.

The main culprit in this sense is using your laptop on a furnished surface such as a bed or sofa; duvets, sheets and pillows will press hard up against your air vents and prevent air from moving properly, check out the photo below to see what I mean.

The solution in this case is to use your laptop at a desk or table, or to utilize a dinner tray or portable stand so that your vents remain clear.  Doing this will also prevent prolonged contact between the hot laptop and your body, which reduces the risk of injury.

2)Check Your Power Settings

Most laptops have the ability to turn down processor speeds when the laptop isn’t working that hard.  If you’re just using your laptop for office work or for general web browsing then there’s no reason to have the processor running at full power, and turning it down will reduce the amount of heat generated.  In Windows 7 you can access the power settings from the control panel.

Dropping it down a notch or two will reduce heat slightly, but also improve battery life, so it’s win/win.  Just make sure to turn it back up if you need to do something that’s processor intensive.

3)Make Sure You Have The Latest Drivers

It sounds silly, but it really can make a difference; the latest drivers for things like the graphics card and various other chips in your laptop will almost always be more efficient than the previous ones.  Better efficiency means smarter use of resources which will result in less heat being generated.  The best thing to do is to head over to the manufacturers website and look for drivers for your model, they’ll almost always have a date next to them so you can tell if they’re newer or older than the ones that you have.

Also, don’t be fooled into thinking that your nice shiny new laptop has the latest drivers; it could have been sat on the shelf in a warehouse for months before it came into your possession.

4)Remove Un-needed Software.

When you buy a new laptop it will almost always come with a bunch of bundled software; things like trial versions of anti-virus software or third party tools and utilities.  Some of these will be essential for the functionality of your laptop, but others will just be bloated pieces of (poorly written) software that you’re never going to use.  Problem is that some of these applications are going to run automatically when Windows starts and sit in the background chewing up processor time.  If you’re 100% sure that you don’t need the application, then remove it; not only will this free up hard disk space, but it’ll also reduce the strain on your processor which will reduce the amount of heat being generated.  You can find a list of applications that you can remove under Control Panel, just click where it says “Uninstall a program”:

5)Don’t Use Your Laptop While Plugged In (ALL THE TIME!)

OK, I understand that there’s a need to charge a laptop from time to time, but leaving your laptop plugged in as a matter of course will do you no favours when it comes to the heat being generated by it.

Batteries generate heat when they’re charging, as do the mains chargers.  By using your laptop while it’s charging, you’re increasing the amount of time it takes to charge the battery AND generating additional heat at the same time.  If you can avoid it, don’t charge your laptop while you’re using it, instead try to charge it while it’s turned off and then disconnect it when you want to use it.

Not only will this reduce heat but it’ll also improve the life of your battery; they really don’t like being kept 99% charged all the time, it’s always best to let them run down to 5% and then charge them back to 100%.

Conclusion

All of the above will help to reduce the amount of heat that your laptop generates, you may find that some are more practical than others to achieve, but doing any of them should yield positive results.  The number one cause of hardware failure in laptops is heat related, so changing the way you use your machine could save you a lot of money as well as protect your health.