Laptop cooling - what can I do?

[Mahesh Abnave]

I have Dell XPS 15, L502X.
Processor: i7 2630QM
RAM: 16GB

I bought this machine in June 2011 for 55000 INR. (Put extra RAM afterwards) And it is still showing of its beast. i7 on machine is super good. I want to use this machine for as many years as possible since its really good at performance. And 6th gen i7 Intel processors with equivalent clock speed and number of cores are very costly. This makes new laptops having such configuration very costly - more than 100000 INR. But I feel its high temperature levels may ruin it.

I live in India. In summers, its really hot hear. I have observation that in these days my laptop internal temperature grow very big. I first faced it when in summer 2013, my laptop started abruptly restarting...I realized that temperature is shooting. So I searched online and tried All CPU Meter Windows 7 gadget with PC Meter plugin. I realized that the temperature was shooting as high as 100 degrees!!!!

Now its summer again. I now have Windows 10 and running Coretemp for temperature monitoring. The temperature is no between 70-85 degrees. What should I do. Should I care? If yes what precautions should I take? What options I have?

 

[sizzling]

Buy the proper cans of compressed air for cleaning computers and blow through the vents. The heat sinks in laptops clog up with dust very quickly.

Don't use the laptop on your lap, only on a smooth flat surface, this helps the airflow around the laptop. If needed and sounds like a good idea if you live in a hot place like India is a laptop cooling stand which has addition fans to help keep cool air supplied to the laptop

 

[Mahesh Abnave]

Buy the proper cans of compressed air for cleaning computers and blow through the vents. The heat sinks in laptops clog up with dust very quickly.

Don't use the laptop on your lap, only on a smooth flat surface, this helps the airflow around the laptop. If needed and sounds like a good idea if you live in a hot place like India is a laptop cooling stand which has addition fans to help keep cool air supplied to the laptop

Do laptop cooling pads work or they are just gimmicky? There are too many of them on Amazaon. But I never tried one as I find them weird to use. Putting such pad below laptop means the laptop height might get high above the table on which I will be keeping cooling pad and then the laptop. That means my hands may strain quickly. So are they really worth?

 

[jsmithepa]

Cooling pads help if the bottom of the case is metal and used as heatsink, because all the the pad does is blow air to the bottom of the case, it does nothing to draw hot air from INSIDE the case, that's the sole job of the inside fan(s).

CPU and components are designed to run up to 100c and automatically throttle down (slows clock) to keep things within tolerance. Run a utility to note when it's throttling (real time display of the instantaneous frequency the CPU is running). Throttling signifies the cooling mechanism is working as it should. The fan also speed up and get louder as temp increases, again this is what normally should happens. If nothing else bothers you, it should be OK as long as you don't get sudden shutdowns (in zero second everything goes black) and you can't boot it back up until it cools.

But if this just bothers you, or your hand is simply getting uncomfortable, there are utilities that can adjust when the throttling occurs and user configurable, this of course will lower performance, that's the trade-off you get performance vs heat. In fact before you do this, the BIOS usually have settings for PERFORMANCE - STANDARD - QUIET. Performance mode says turn up fan sooner to keep things cool in lieu of fan noise, again a trade-off.