"Overheating" Laptop

RedFFWolf

I have a Sony Vaio Laptop (VPCEJ1Z1E), Windows 7 64-bit. It seems to be overheating lately, causing the laptop to power off. I installed SpeedFan and when the laptop begins to overheat, it shows the temperature shoot up from an average 40 degrees to the 60s/70s value, then again to 80/90 in about 5 seconds, creeping up to about 100 or so, powering off at about 107 degrees.

The only time this overheating happens is playing certain games or having multiple movie players open at once (three QuickTime for example, and sometimes just one Windows Media Player) and even playing a Youtube video on Google Chrome, but not Internet Explorer (unless other stuff is going on). In short, I'm pretty sure it's a graphics problem of some sort - Unity 3 projects, for example, power off my laptop in 5 seconds at best.

Now, the laptop is not hot at all (unless this heat is purely internal, but such heat so quickly seems ridiculous); there may just be a problem with the graphics card and its sensory or something. My graphics card is NVIDIA GeForce 410M. What can I do? Is it best I get a new graphics card? [NVIDIA drivers are up-to-date, and I'm going to email NVIDIA too].

Cuddlesworth

Sounds more like the fan is broken or the heatsink has become detached.

RedFFWolf

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

Sounds more like the fan is broken or the heatsink has become detached.

I'm not sure about the former. I should have added in that if I stop the videos or games playing, the temperature, as according to SpeedFan, stalls for a bit (for the most part) and then goes back down to 40s/50s rather quickly. The latter suggestion is an interesting one (but I'm not too tech savvy in this regard), so I'm going to look into this one.

Thanks for your reply!

Overheal

Keep in mind that it shouldn't matter about the load, a laptop at stock settings that can't handle heavy load (gaming, Prime95 etc) without overheating, is doing something wrong.

DesperateDan

It is very likely that the gpu fan just needs a good clean. I was sceptical that was the problem with mine because it only became very hot when graphically intensive things were happening - so I figured it was some driver issue. But think about it, when the gpu is crunching numbers is exactly when it should be getting hot. I bet you there is a big old blockage and the fan needs to be lifted and seriously dusted.

Moon54

Yeah, like Dan said, I'd reckon the fan and grills/heatpipe are blocked with fluff & dust.
I've seen many a laptop with this problem.

If you can access it, try removing the fan carefully and use a small (unused!) paint-brush
to gently remove the dust and fluff.