Wifes laptop overheating

Hello people,

Not sure if you guys are the right ones to ask but I'll give it a go.

My wife prefers a laptop to a desktop and her 4 year old HP started shutting down and telling her its overheating. Installing Speccy and watching the temp it sure seems that way. It's also telling her it needs a battery which she has already ordered, but has not received yet. I have my doubts that a bad battery could be to blame for this odd change of behavior but it seems to be a possibility. Yes the fan does run plenty but it doesn't seem to do much.

I promptly brought it to the local PC shop and they could not tell me much so I decided to wait. I did pick up a cooling fan tray and we tried that. It sure does bring down the temperature to normal until...

Until you start using the internet. Does not matter which browser. It goes from 50C straight up into the 90's fast. That's with the onboard fan and the tray goin to town. Searching the net for answers seems to direct me to cleaning it out. It sounds like sound reasoning but I'm not so sure in this case.

So far she can do anything on the computer except browsing or it goes nuclear.

Any experience or suggestions? Also on the outside chance she may have picked up a virus (she uses adaware) could such a thing do this too?

Thanks

Tony

First easy step - Get a can of compressed air and blow out all the dust.

onn. Electronics Duster Compressed Gas Cleaner, 10 oz, 2-Pack - Walmart.com - Walmart.com

This stuff? Should I use this through the small vents or should I open the machine up?

XPalidocious said:

onn. Electronics Duster Compressed Gas Cleaner, 10 oz, 2-Pack - Walmart.com - Walmart.com

This stuff? Should I use this through the small vents or should I open the machine up?

Yep. You can get it just about anywhere.

Go through the small vents.

Open it up. You want to blow the dust OUT, not blow it around inside.

Run HD Sentinel: (free or trial edition)
Hard Disk Sentinel - HDD health and temperature monitoring
Hard Disk Sentinel - HDD health and temperature monitoring
For each drive post images of these tabs into the thread:
Overview tab
Temperature
SMART
Disk performance

Take Screenshot in Windows 10 Windows 10 General Tips Tutorials
Take Screenshot in Windows 10

I use Real Temp monitor (during video conversion). I gives you temp and cpu load. The only time my cpu load is 20% or higher is with video cnverting. During surfing cpu load might be 5% or less. Check whether during normal windows operations you cpu load remains low. In the past there were complaints that a browser program (Firefox?) involved very high cpu loads. But that should not be the case anymore.

OK, I can't stop myself from making this suggestion: Christmas is almost here...buy her a new DELL!