Overheating Laptop Issues, and How to Identify Them

When you buy a laptop you can quickly become accustomed to the heat coming from it. After several months the heat may quickly become unbearable, and at some point you have to ask whether these overheating issues are going to harm your laptop.

Overheating laptop issues can arrise quickly, but you may get some errors to warn you of what is happening before your hardware breaks down completely. Different overheating laptop components can be effected differently by heat issues, but nearly every single laptop component can be damaged by extreme heat.

One of the first overheating laptop issues is a drop in laptop performance.  You may notice increasingly slow start up times. The performance of your games may decrease, and even moving the mouse can become jerky and unresponsive. While there are plenty of other factors that can affect laptop performance, heat can be a major contributing factor.

The hard drive, one of the few moving components in a laptop is esepcially susceptable to overheating.  If you have an overheating laptop, the hard drive may begin to develop access errors, and may crash completely. If your hard drive breaks down chances are it will either will be impossible or expensive to recover your data.

The graphics card is another at risk component in an overheating laptop.  With modern games you will often need a high powered graphics card, and these things get HOT! An overheating graphics card can often be spotted by reduced in game performance, graphical glitches, and if left unresolved, a black screen.

Along with the GPU, the CPU can also be affected by overheating laptop issues.  CPU’s are generally better cooled than the GPU, but you will still notice a drop in performance if it gets too hot.  Unlike some other laptop components a CPU will automatically shut a computer down if it becomes critically hot. This often prevents ‘one shot’ damage to your laptop, but repeated overheating can still cause problems.

If your computer is randomly switching itself off, chances are the CPU is overheating.

Your computers memory (RAM) generally does not create a large amount of heat, but it can still overheat if the internal temperature becomes too high. It is hard to identify whether your laptop memory is overheating or not, since it’s symptom is simply a performance drop.  If the memory develops seriosu problems hwever you will get a message on boot, or if all of it becomes damaged your laptop will not start.

Since most modern laptops do not provide enough cooling internally, a laptop cooler can help provide an effecient, cheap, external laptop cooling solution!