If you want to know how to fix overheating the laptop without taking it apart, don’t worry. It’s a common problem – your laptop overheats. Maybe you’ve been working too long, and it’s a hot summer day, or maybe you’re just looking to make the most of your free time at work.
Regardless, if your computer is starting to overheat, take heed because that can lead to serious problems shortly!
Luckily for you, we have solutions to fix an overheating laptop without taking it apart.
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Tips on How to Fix Overheating Laptop without Taking It Apart
Find out the cause of the overheating
The first step in solving your overheating laptop problem is finding out why it’s overheating. The most common cause of overheating (and the issue you’re currently experiencing) is dust build-up. Over time, as fans pull air through the machine, dust builds up on the internal components causing everything to heat up. So, what’s the solution?
Well, you could try to take apart your laptop and clean out all that dust for a good cleaning. The problem is that if you’re not careful, then you can easily break something inside of the machine and cause lasting damage. This is especially true with laptops because parts are cramped and hard to access.
Consider using external cooling pads
Another way to fix overheating laptop is to use an external cooling pad. An external cooling pad for a laptop will work by blowing cool air on the bottom of your computer while simultaneously drawing hot air out. This can help lower internal temperature, but it’s worth mentioning that they’re pretty expensive. For example, this one is only $20 on Amazon.
Avoid using your laptop if it overheats
Of course, another simple solution (and one that we recommend) is not to use your laptop when it’s overheating. Sure it’s a pain in the butt, but is using your computer when you can’t even feel airflow from the fans worth damaging something that costs hundreds of dollars? Probably not. Just be aware that if this heats the computer too much, it could damage your internal components permanently.
Disable CPU Turbo Boost
If you have a laptop with an i5 or i7 processor, then this is one of the easier ways to fix overheating laptops. The way laptops work is to attempt to keep your computer cool by automatically speeding up and slowing down parts of your machine as needed. Turbo Boost is used to speed up performance, but it can also cause overheating. Luckily, you can disable Turbo Boost, which will limit how much your computer overclocks during the performance.
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Reconfigure Fan Curve
Another way to fix an overheating laptop is by reconfiguring the fan curve. This will be more difficult because we will have to dig around in system settings and fiddle with them, but the entire process shouldn’t take long. If you’re still having trouble cleaning out your machine and disabling Turbo Boost, then it’s probably time to check into this option.
Accessing Your Fan Curve
To access your fan curve, first, open up system settings (which you can do by typing “system settings” into the search bar on the taskbar). Now click or tap on the option labeled “Fan Speed.” (By default, it should be listed under Hardware.)
Select “Fan Speed” from the options available in the System Settings window.
You’ll find several different options for configuring your fan speeds on this page. First, make sure that the “Maximum Fan Speed” box is checked to ensure that we can configure our fans at their maximum speed. Now scroll down until you find the option labeled “Fan Curve.”
To access your fan curve, ensure that you have the “max” box checked. Afterward, scroll down to locate and select the “fan curve” button.
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Configuring Your Fan Curve
Once you’ve found and selected this button, a new window will pop up with two sets of bars or graphs. The goal here is to drag the bars to send more air through the laptop fan when it’s hotter and less when it’s cooler. This ensures that your computer will use its fans more efficiently, which means they’ll run less frequently, which in turn means you’ll experience less overheating.
Close Resource Heavy Applications
One of the easiest ways to use fewer resources is by uninstalling resource-heavy applications or limiting how much processing power they use. Resource-heavy applications are usually games, but they could also be video editing software. Whatever the case, keeping this stuff closed when you don’t need it can help prevent too many resources from being used and therefore prevent overheating.
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Temporarily Disable Overclocking
Overclocking is the act of overdoing it on your machine so that you can increase the speed at which it processes information. This means an overclocked computer will have a higher rate of heat being produced, so to prevent overheating, we recommend temporarily disabling this functionality when you need to. To do this, open up your system settings and look for the “CPU” option.
To temporarily disable overclocking so that your computer doesn’t get too hot while you’re playing a game or doing something else resource-heavy, click or tap on the CPU option.
Choose “Custom,” then select either the i5 or i7 options and set the clock speed to someplace between 800 and 2400 MHz.
Afterward, click or tap Ok and accept any changes that need to be made for your machine actually to follow through on these new settings. Once this is done, you’ll get a message saying something like, “Custom CPU will run at lower than default clock speeds.”
This isn’t a perfect solution to overheating, so we recommend you go ahead and look into either disabling Turbo Boost or reconfiguring your fan curve before setting the CPU speed back to its default value.
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Notes: Disabling overclocking can cause low frame rates in games that expect high processing power from the dual-cores. If this is the case, re-enabling overclocking can boost performance and fix any frame rate problems you may be experiencing.
How to Fix Overheating Laptop without Taking It Apart
While overheating is an inherent problem with laptops, this doesn’t mean you need to live with it. By disabling resource-heavy applications before doing something heavy like gaming or video editing and reconfiguring your fan curve, overheating can be reduced to a point where you can still enjoy your machine without experiencing any serious problems.