Laptop Overheating

Mon 12 May 2014 by pj Tagged as laptop personal news

This morning, my laptop was, as usual, showing an average idle running temp of around 76C, which is fairly hot, but didn't seem too bad... until I put it under load, at which point it shut down because of the temp limit of 97C. Much searching of the Internet commenced, trying to find out what might make a W510 overheat and shut down. Perhaps the heatsink on the CPU wasn't seated properly - but you'd think that would have evinced itself sometime in the previous two years of ownership!

Over lunch, acting on a hunch, I removed the keyboard so as to get at the internals, and applied massive amounts of compressed air, sending much dust flying.

New idle temp at bootup: 46C.

This reminds me of a friend's '$20 home repair of your desktop or your money back' idea: such a service would do nothing more than show up, take the machine outside, crack the case and apply an air compressor. Either you make $20 for <5min of work, or you give them their money back - no matter what, it didn't take much time, so on to the next one!