If your computer is shutting down and refusing to restart at an ambient temperature of only 88F, then you definitely have issues beyond just your home air conditioner not working.

Do you have any software installed to read the temperature sensors on your motherboard and chips? The appropriate software on Linux is "lmsensors", but I don't know about on Windows computers.

Definitely clean your fans, make sure they are all spinning appropriately, check routing of cables inside your box to make sure they are not blocking airflow, etc. It could also be that your thermal paste between the CPU and heatsink has aged (rare) or was never correctly applied in the first place.

At no significant load, my CPU temps typically run 25C (77F), which is about 6F degrees above ambient in my house. When the computer is under significant load - transcoding video for example - CPU temps rise to about 31C or 32C, about 18F degrees above ambient. This same computer had an older CPU a few months ago (I upgraded the box recently). That older CPU had developed heat shutdown issues. Turns out the thermal paste had degraded over the years. That old CPU would send the box into thermal shutdown when transcoding video because cooling was far from adequate given the thermal paste issue. When diagnosing the problem, I watched the CPU temp sensors in real time. The box would shutdown at a little over 100C. That is quite high for a CPU! Well above design limits. But 100C is 212F, and you most certainly should not be hitting those kind of CPU temps at your house ambient of a mere 88F, no matter how heavily loaded the box is. After just a few thermal shutdowns, you should probably consider your CPU might be on it's last legs from heat stress, and consider replacing it.

Back in the old days computers were more heat sensitive. I remember huge computers huddled together in special highly cooled rooms. We'd have to wear light jackets to keep warm when working in there. But home PCs are not anywhere like those beasts from the old days.

I typically pull the side off my PC's and blow them out every six months or so. If you have animals and/or there are smokers in the house, that will clog up heatsinks and fans faster than you would imagine.

Get some canned air or take it out to the garage and blast it out with the air compressor if you have one.

Several years ago, HP was using some pretty bad thermal compound between the heat sinks and their CPU's. It would actually dry out, and become fairly non-heat conductive.

The best thermal paste you can buy and use has ground industrial diamond in it. I bought a tube of it years ago, and it lasts forever and lowers your CPU temps significantly as more heat is getting absorbed by the Heatsink instead of building up in the CPU.

thank you all...

Do not set your laptop onto a solid anything that does not act as a heatsink. e.g., a solid wood desktop is a bad place to set a laptop. Even if the fans are not obstructed, the wood acts as an insulator to keep heat inside your laptop. On the other hand, if your desktop happens to be made out of solid steel, that would act as a great heatsink, not an insulator like wood.

Get four plastic bottle caps (all the same size) off of soda pop bottles, water bottles, etc. And use those as little feet under your laptop to raise it up a bit off the desk. Even raising it only 1/2" with bottle caps does wonders. It will cool that puppy right down. Throw a few spare bottle caps in your laptop bag so you have them when you are mobile.

[edit]You can buy "laptop chillers". They have fans in them and you set your laptop on top. Problem is, even though they add additional fans, the top of the chiller pad is so close to the bottom of your laptop that it pretty much defeats the purpose. Bottle caps - with no additional chiller fans - work much better in my experience (and they're cheaper too!)[/edit]

(from an electronics manufacturing engineer - my prev. career)

Be careful with compressed air and vacuuming internals.

Moving dry air creates static electricity. Static charges, if transferred to electronic components will damage them. (ESD - Electro Static Discharge)

Moving air such as thru the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner will generate static charge on the nozzle (plastic, insulator) which can be discharged to electronics thru contact. Service techs who have to vacuum electronics have special ESD-safe vacuums to do the job. They also have ESD-safe grounded mats to put the boards on and keep components in ESD-safe conductive plastic or mylar bags until installation.

Cleaning the dust out therefore offers the opportunity to kill the computer with ESD.

I'd brush the dust off using a metal handled, short-bristle brush and use a vacuum cleaner in the area to catch the generated airborne dust. I would NOT use the vacuum nozzle directly on the board or heat sinks. (fan and grills would be ok)

Wow, you nailed it on the head. The Laptop sits on a nice wooden desk. I'm going to try the bottle cap trick. I assume that any reduction in heat will be beneficial to the reliability/life of the Laptop. Thanks haertig,

And when you buy your next laptop but a business grade one. I have a 10 year old business laptop that has lived its life on the arm of the couch. They are typically have better heat sinks and the vents on the sides rather than the bottom because they are designed to be used all day long.

Although the whole netbook market crashed and burned when the first iPads came out, I still enjoy my Lenovo S10-3. One reason why I bought it was because it uses a lower power CPU, thus producing less heat. The only time the outside gets noticeably warm is after watching videos for a while. I figured that less heat would hopefully translate into more reliability over the long run (I don't change computers very often. The last computer I bought before this was a Mac iBook G4!)

I used it as my work computer for quite a few years, even in rather hot indoor temperatures, and the fan did not go on much over an 8-hour workday if I avoided wasting time by watching video clips. It's still my main computer at home.

The processing power in PC's and even your smartphone is almost unbelievable. Quad core processors in a device the size of a deck of cards? Incredible. That's far more horsepower than the original Space Shuttle had, even including all the redundant computer backup systems. Of course, all that power in your hand comes with a tradeoff--needs more power and produces a lot more heat.

It wasn't that long ago that a US distributor got into trouble selling outdated video game consoles (Sony PS3's IIRC) to Iran for use in missle guidance systems. That's the kind of processing power that we take for granted nowadays.

A key design point is that some people use notebooks on their lap, which is a much harder problem than any desk surface. Any notebook that has solved the lap cooling problem is going to be fine on a flat surface as long as the notebook still has all its feet.

The usual problem I see is airflow obstructed at the hot air exhaust. Anything near that port on the chassis is a problem. It's not just blocking that port: anything within a couple of inches may be a problem.


A full-up SAIL simulation of the shuttle involved 200+ computers throughout building 16 at JSC. It's hard to compare since some of those were analog computers, but my Galaxy Note II is probably more powerful than all of the SAIL computers combined, probably by an order of magnitude. SAIL may have had greater I/O bandwidth - I'm not sure how well my phone can drive its USB port.

Running at full load my cell phone gets a little warm. I'm not sure about SAIL, but trust me it wasn't just "a little warm".

Better competition is a Cray 2.

Evidently Lenova (previously IBM) hasn't been able to solve the lap cooling problem with their ThinkPads then.