Laptop Cooling - Tips on keeping your laptop cool
With laptops increasingly becoming more and more central to our lives, its becoming essential that they keep on working, to this end laptop cooling is an important part of maintaining your laptops longevity.
Below are some tips on how laptop cooling can be achieved and an explanation of some of the effects if your laptop starts to overheat.
What happens if your laptop isn't kept cool
It overheats... though I imagine you are after a little more info than that! This is the reason that laptop cooling is so important is that overheating can cause serious, and possibly fatal damage to your laptop.
Most modern laptops will turn themselves off before they reach a dangerous running temperature, however sometimes they don't, and sometimes your laptop may not even have this function and so efficient laptop cooling becomes significantly harder.
If your laptop is allowed to overheat, things will fry, and this is clearly bad. Without laptop cooling your laptops insides will start to bend, break and even melt, as you can imagine this scenario is not one to relish.
Laptop Cooling Techniques
Most laptop owners have spent sometime with the laptop actually on their laps, and this quickly shows you how much heat the unit can generate.
Normally this is fine (as far as the laptop goes, possibly not so fine for your lap), the laptop will have at least one fan to keep things cool, but sometimes even this is not enough cooling if the fan does not have enough air flowing through it to keep the components cool, usually because the air inlets and outlets are blocked, a common occurrence when the unit is on your lap for example.
As mentioned above, always make sure the air vents underneath, and at the back of your laptop are clear, thus allowing the laptop to circulate air as it needs to to keep the temperature in check.
Another way to help laptop cooling is not to actually sit the laptop directly in your lap, place something solid between the laptop and your lap, this will ensure the vents have enough space, your lap doesn't get too hot, and the laptop doesn't increase its temperature further because your lap is reflecting heat back up into it!
Additionally you can now buy USB laptop fan units that attach to the side of your laptop and suck the warm air out of it. These are an inexpensive and effective way of laptop cooling and help to ensure your laptop never overheats.
Generally you just need to stay aware of your laptops health, if it starts to act strange, shutting itself down or doing strange things when running applications etc, it may be a sign of overheating and you should try and apply some of the above laptop cooling techniques to see if it helps.
If you notice the fan is no longer running (i.e. it is always off and never turns) then you should get it repaired ASAP as this will mean there is no cooling happening at all and your laptop will be in danger of serious damage.
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