Is your laptop getting too hot?
Is your laptop getting too hot?
Hi, I have been having some problems lately with my Lenovo V15 ADA laptop (pretty much solely used by my kids, and as such has not been treated particularly well since we bought it 2 years ago). It occasionally crashes without any warning – the screen goes black, the power button light remains on and the fan keeps running, but it is otherwise unresponsive. The only way to bring it back to life is by pressing the power button for 10 seconds to do a hard reset. I am fairly convinced that this is a thermal issue – I found that the fan was fairly clogged up with dust (now cleaned out). I also removed the heat sink and the old thermal paste, and replaced with some fresh stuff. I have also bought a cooling tray, which does seem to have improved things but not wholly. I also find that the laptop is far more likely to crash if it is plugged in, rather than when it is running off the battery. According to Core Temp, the temperature of the CPU does not seem to be getting too high in my opinion – 65 deg C max. I am running out of ideas for what to try next. Is it possible that the CPU is actually hotter than Core Temp is reporting it? Or could it be some other component that is getting hot that is causing a thermal shutdown? I am contemplating cutting some additional slots into the laptop case such that the cooling tray has a greater effect (it has 6 fans, but only 3 of them are aligned with the existing slots in the case and the other 3 are just directed straight into solid plastic – if I cut some more holes I was thinking that maybe I could get more air flowing through the interior of the laptop. Another thought - could it be that the CPU has been damaged if it has been run for too long with a clogged up fan, and therefore is more prone to failing when getting hot? Has anyone had a similar issue, and if so did you manage to fix it? Thanks, Ackoman
Hey, if you clean the fans and replace the thermal paste, you can try turning your laptop off with no battery attached. This might help when updating the BIOS to get a fresh version. First, take out the hard drive and power supply, then plug in only the charger. Leave it on for a few minutes while it tries to shut down normally. If it shuts down properly, check the charger to make sure it's working right. Then put the hard drive back in along with the battery. After that, disconnect everything again, take out the battery, and press power for about 10 seconds to drain all energy from the motherboard. Put the battery back in and try turning it on once more. Usually, this kind of reset will restore the BIOS settings to default. If your hard drive won't start up at all, you'll have to go into the BIOS manually and fix boot settings before testing again. Let me know if everything works fine now.
I see lots of complaints about gaming laptops that don't work well. Usually, you have to plug them in to play games. A common reason is thermal throttling. Laptop coolers need to be small and light because they are hard to make big or strong. They also aren't very powerful. If you run an app like HWMonitor or HWinfo, you can see the current, lowest, and highest CPU temperatures. For Intel chips, if your max temperature hits 100C, that means you have throttled down. Your CPU will slow its speed and cut power to save itself until things get better again. At this lower speed, even if it is only using 100% of what the processor can do. What should you do? First, make sure your cooler's airways are clear and that the fan is spinning fast enough. Use a Windows balanced power profile instead of just performance mode. Set minimum CPU to something like 20%. It might seem weird at first, but try changing the Windows balanced power profile advanced settings to set max to 90% instead of the default 100%. You probably won't notice much difference in how fast it runs right away.
Hi - thanks for getting back to me. I tested this with the battery taken out, but no cooling tray attached. It just stopped working after a few seconds while turning on, so it wasn't really put through much stress. I'll try your other suggestions as well.