5 Tips to Prevent Your Laptop from Overheating

Over the years, laptop and computer processors have become more powerful. With more power comes one major problem, heat dissipation.

To ensure good performance over a longer period of usage, it is important to ensure minimal heat build up through proper heat management. Here are 5 tips that will help you prevent your laptop from overheating.

1. Ensure Good Air Flow

Firstly, it is important to identify where the laptop or desktop vent is located. With the vents located, go ahead and ensure that there is nothing blocking the vents and that there is a good air flow surrounding the vents.

• For laptops / desktop with vents located at the back: Ensure that the device is not placed against a wall. Better yet, place a mini fan behind the device for a better air flow.
• For laptops / desktop with vents located beneath: Ensure that the device is propped up to prevent trapping of heat beneath the device. Better yet, invest in a cooler pad or a laptop stand.
• For laptops with a built-in heatsink casing: Ensure that the device is placed on a cool surface or a cooler pad.

With good ventilation and air flow, it will greatly reduce the chances of overheating.

2. Cool and Dry Environment

Aside from good ventilation, the surrounding environment can also impact the overall performance. This is the main reason why crypto miners thrive in countries with an overall cooler climate.

Ideally, an air-cond room will help dissipate heat and keep your device cool. However, leaving the aircond on for an extended duration can be costly.

If an aircond room is not a viable option, simply avoid areas with any additional sources of heat and humidity such as the kitchen or window with direct mid-day sunlight.

3. Do NOT Overclock Too Often

Put your built-in processor settings to good use. Whether it is your AMD Radeon settings or Intel Graphics settings, this is a good starting point to throttle overall GPU performance to a level that is fitting to your gaming needs.

While overclocking your device does offer an improvement in performance, we strongly advise against doing so if you do not particularly savvy in this area. Overclocking does require a good understanding of heat management to avoid causing damage to any hardware.

Lastly, a quick hard fix to avoid overheating during casual usage is to cap the maximum processor state. This can be done by Windows users only by following these steps:

• Click the battery in your icon tray and choose more power option. 
• Change plan settings for the one you use, then click Advanced power settings. 
• Click processor power management, then maximum processor status. 
• Set both to around 70-90%.

4. Clean Vents and Heatsink Regularly

Excessive dust will block the computer’s vents, resulting in poor air circulation inside the device and become less effective in dissipating heat.

Depending on your living conditions, you are recommended to clean the cooling fan and heatsink every 3 to 6 months. The cleaning process is relatively straightforward and can be done as long as you have the right screwdrivers, soft brush and cotton swabs.

Most importantly, when carrying out the cleaning process, ensure there are no liquid close by as the computer components do not react well to any moisture. Nevertheless, utilizing alcohol swabs will work fine.

5. Keep Your PC Updated

Keeping your computer software and driver updated is also crucial in ensuring that your device functions optimally. Outdated software and drivers can lead to potential incompatibilites and cause a device performance to deteriorate.

In certain cases, incompatible driver and software may also cause the device to work harder, thus leading to overheating issues.

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