Unnatural laptop heat

Delzhand

My Dell E1505 has been getting super hot, recently. I basically use it as a desktop replacement, running it off AC with no battery.

Recently, though, the right side palm rest has been getting super hot, including all the keys to the right of L. And I'm not sure if it's related, but Windows has been registering clicks from my USB mouse and tablet as doubleclicks sometimes, and often thinking I've released a mouse button when I haven't. The USB ports are on the laptop's right side.

It's still fully operational, but I don't know what's causing this heat. It's only three years old and I'm not doing anything particularly high performance with it.

mspencer

The problem could be dust or poor airflow (also possibly caused by dust.)

I want to recommend something that worked for my coworker's laptop, but may not do anything for yours: turn the laptop completely off and disconnect the power cable. get a can of compressed air and blow a set of lots of quick bursts into each of the vent openings, both inflow and outflow. Be careful not to over-rev a fan when you do this: if you hear a fan starting to "kazoo" -- start making a higher pitched whine -- then stop and wait a second or two for the fan to spin down again.

My coworker's laptop would overheat and shut down after about 30 minutes of run time. I did the above procedure to her laptop and was able to keep it running for a week solid.

ronya

Dust, probably, as mspencer said. If your laptop is out of warranty, it'll help if you opened the case and took compressed air to it.

Also, look what's directly under the right side of the keyboard, since you say that's the hottest area. Graphics card? Processor chip?

ApexMirage

My laptop vidcard was recently running at a whopping 100c, and simply blowing into the ventilated areas as hard as I could brought it down to 80c. Even if It's not your main heat problem, It'll undoubtedly help.

Delzhand

I'll try the compressed air thing. It's definitely out of warranty, and I've opened the LCD casing a few times - I'm not shy about cracking it open.

The strange things is that the hot area is where the expansion slot is, and it's empty. The area closer to the front is the battery slot, which is also empty. There are the USB slots near the top, and then some other thing I don't recognize.



Edit: I'm going to leave the "plug" out of the expansion slot for some extra airflow and see if it helps.

underdonk

Ensure your video card, one of the main sources of heat in any system, is not running in "max performance mode" all of the time. This made the largest difference for me in terms of cooling down my D830. Alternatively, work from your freezer.

Delzhand

Holy shit, that might be it. A while back I realized that using my laptop on battery caused vista to run at 1/2 framerate, which fucked with my game development, and I think I set Vista to run at max performance or something. I'll have to look at the power settings and check.

Tofystedeth

Heh, my wife has the same laptop. She runs it with no battery as well. It locked up while I was raiding Ulduar the other day.
I just picked it up and held my oscillating fan up to blow between it and the desk and had no further problems.

After you do the dusting, you might see if you can find just a little bit of something to shim it up a little so there is more airflow underneath and less surface contact to hold heat against it.

Delzhand

My ATI Powerplay settings were set to max performance when plugged in. I changed it to balanced. Also blew out all the vents. We'll see how it goes before I decide to buy a can or air or crack it open.

Delzhand

I found some software that keeps track of the cpu temp, and it looks like my system runs pretty consistently at 60 degrees celsius since turning the gpu performance to balanced. While it seems cooler, that's still about 140 degrees Fahrenheit, which seems like it might be in the danger range. I'm going to back up my data and crack this thing open. I'll let you know how it goes.