How To Keep Laptops Cool: [7 Highly Effective & Actionable Tips]

Almost everyone who uses a laptop has met this issue at some point in their life. It might be difficult to diagnose the reason behind the production of excessive heat in your laptop. A lot of factors can cause laptops to become hot or heated.

The most common way to keep a laptop cool is to add a cooling fan. You also should clear all the vents while you’re at it. Sometimes stopping a certain resource-heavy program/game can help it. If you have an old laptop, replacing the thermal paste often works as a solution.

It’s a little tricky to provide a pinpoint solution about how to keep laptops cool until you find the root of it. Stay tuned as I will describe the probable reasons behind overheating and how you can cool down your laptop accordingly.

Signs that your laptop is overheating

If your laptop begins to overheat after using it for only a couple of minutes, you may have a significant problem such as malfunctioning cooling fans, clogged ventilation systems, and so on. We often take too long to realize that our laptop is overheating, and by the time we take the necessary steps, it’s already too late.

To stop that from happening to you, here’s a list of a few signs which will help you understand whether your laptop is overheating or not before it’s too late.

1.  Your laptop’s keyboard will overheat, you will feel the heat radiating from the keyboard while working with software that is graphically intense (gaming, video editing, etc.)

2. You should also consider it as a sign if your laptop is emitting weird sounds while working. This often happens as a result of malfunctioning cooling fans.

3. There are a variety of small particles that can get caught in the cooling fan and cause it to overheat by reducing its performance, resulting in a musty odor.

4. If you can’t detect or feel any air flowing out of the exhaust ports, your cooling fan may need to be serviced or replaced.
5. You should be concerned about overheating issues if the laptop you are using shuts off on its own. Automatic shutdown of all systems should occur when the CPU of your computer becomes overheated to the point of causing serious damage.

6. There may be pauses or freezes while using the software. Heat may increase CPU stress. When your CPU is strained, it can’t do its other critical tasks properly.

7. The thermal paste in your computer is no longer effective.

How to keep Your laptop cool: Effective Tips & Tricks

Before I start, I should let you know, laptops getting heated up isn’t something to get panicked about. It is normal for a laptop to get heated, as it will get cooled off as well. The problem is when your laptop gets abnormally hot regularly.

Most of the time you need to cool your laptop while either gaming or working with a heavy program. Even if you have a perfectly fine laptop, under such pressure any laptop tends to overheat.

The reason behind this temperature rise in your laptop is the immense pressure on both CPU and GPU. Though the pressure on a laptop while gaming or rendering a high-resolution video is inevitable, still, I have gathered a few tips for you which might assist to cool your laptop.

1. Purchase a cooler for your laptop

There are several laptop cooling pads on the market, and they do the job just fine. These fans are extremely simple to set up. Place the pad on the surface you usually put your laptop on, place your laptop on top of it and turn it on. Using the pad’s fan, you can now cool down your laptop by directing air toward the bottom. When working on a bed or other soft surfaces, these coolers are a necessity.

You can purchase a cooler for your laptop from any tech shop near you. You can also get them online. While purchasing make sure you get a cooler from a renowned brand.

2. Place your laptop in a well ventilated area

You may reduce airflow by placing your laptop on a soft or uneven surface such as a bed, a pillow, or your lap. As the soft or uneven surface prevents air from escaping through the vents, the laptop gets hot.

So, to ensure your laptop’s well-being, you should avoid laying your laptop down on foam or soft surfaces. If it is necessary, make certain that you have a functioning cooling pad to ensure proper ventilation of your laptop.

3. Clean the fans in your laptop

Cooling fan performance becomes impeded by the accumulation of dust and other micro-particles resulting in poor operation and performance degradation. There are various ways of cleaning a laptop fan. You can check out the article on how to clean laptop fans to have a clear idea about how you should clean your laptop fan.

In short, there are two ways you can clean the fans of your laptop. Either by opening the laptop and cleaning the fans or by using compressed air. Both of these procedures have their pros and cons.

The first method is an effective way of cleaning, but lengthy and needs a pair of expert hands. First, you will need to take off the back part of your laptop. then clean the fan with clean microfiber cloths or towels. Because microfiber is a synthetic material and that the small fibers are capable of picking up more dirt, it may absorb substantially more dust and macro particles from fans than other materials.

And the method of using compressed air is very easy and simple to perform. All you need to do is aim the nozzle of the canned air towards the vents of your laptop. And in no time the laptop fan will be clean. Just be careful about not holding the can of pressurized air upside down.

4. Adjust your settings and power plan based on demand

To access more power settings, navigate to Power Options > Additional Power Settings. Now, you may choose between three different power plans: balanced, high performance, or power saver. You can even design your plan based on your requirements. This may increase your energy consumption and keep the laptop cool.

5. Install an SSD

SSD is relevantly new for storage equipment and thus comes with better heat management properties. [Take this as a rule of thumb: newer parts = better at dealing with heat]. And unlike HDD, they don’t generate a lot of heat either.

Flash memory is used in solid-state drives, which are known for their high performance and long lifespan. As a result, computers operate cooler with solid-state disks, since they consume less power. Having less heat is an advantage of installing an SSD.

6. Replace the thermal paste on your laptop

To avoid overheating, it is critical to remove heat from the CPU quickly.  In the absence of thermal paste, the CPU and heat sink are unable to transfer heat effectively. Air is a poor conductor of heat, thus the CPU and the heat sink should be as close together as possible to maximize heat transmission.

This is where the thermal paste is needed. Applying thermal paste between the processor and the heat sink helps to keep the processor cool. A little shovel-like instrument known as an applicator can be purchased with small tubes of thermal paste at electronics retailers, and it can be used to apply the paste.

A lot more heat builds up in the CPU than it would have if you had applied paste. Stuttering and blue screens are common symptoms of overheating of the CPU, which can lead to random shutdowns.

7. Perform maintenance regularly

Maintaining your laptop regularly is essential. Check the health of the battery, the cooling fan, the power settings, and the battery itself. When utilizing compressed air to clean your cooling fan, you should treat it carefully. Excessive usage might cause damage to other sensitive body parts of the laptop.

You should prevent unwanted software from starting up on its own when the computer is turned on. Insufficient usage of the battery will certainly result in the battery being destroyed. It will shorten the life of your laptop battery, and it may have difficulty holding charge or becoming overheated when charging as a result of this.

How to keep your laptop cool while gaming

Of all the uses of laptops, gaming creates the most amount of pressure. Even with a gaming laptop, you often might encounter heating issues. This is what gave birth to the popular internet joke- “but, can it run crysis?”. And as days go by, even heavier games are released that are really tempting to miss out.

Just look at me for example, I got a laptop for work purposes but ended up playing warframe for hours every week!

The more pressure a laptop is under, the more it overheats. So, while gaming on a laptop, necessary cooling precautions are a must.

Here are a few things you can do while gaming to prevent your laptop from overheating while gaming.

1. Make necessary adjustments to your power settings.
2. Depending on your demands, you may disable overclocking options or under-clock your hardware to avoid your laptop from overheating and crashing altogether.
3. Check to ensure that your laptop is properly connected to the charger.
4. Integrated graphics utilize less power than dedicated graphics, therefore that’s an option to consider. The downside is that it may not perform as well as specialized graphics.
5. Using a cooling pad while gaming is a must if you have frequent heating issues.
6. You can get smoother performance if you try to play a game with high frames per second (FPS), but often allowing that to happen may also lead to system overheating. In this case, you may change the FPS setting if your laptop becomes too hot.
7. Keep a good flow of air. Your laptop draws air from the surrounding environment, which it then utilizes to cool the rest of its hardware. If you’re obstructing the laptop’s ventilation, you may have problems.
8. Don’t download the PC cleaning and monitoring software from untrusted sources. – these are infected with malware and will cause your computer to perform slower.

Frequently asked questions

Parting words

It’s important to know how to keep laptops cool for any laptop user. By making sure that your laptop is not overheating, you can increase the overall lifespan of your laptop by a significant margin. And a great hassle-free continuous performance of the laptop is a bonus of keeping it cool.