i have a four year old toshiba satellite pro pc laptop that started giving me warnings that "a problem with the cooling system has been detected. please shut down and return for service immediately."

a year ago my hard drive failed so i had a new one installed at best buy with a several year warrenty and ever since that got put in, the laptop has been pretty noisy but it worked. then this semester it started saying that it had a cooling problem. so i sent it to best buy on shady grove road, they blasted it with canned air and said it was just full of lint, and was working now, got it back, had the same problem. so this time i took it to a local computer repair shop in frostburg. he said he disassembled it, cleaned the whole thing out, and put it back together for like $65. he said that everything was working.

to make sure it didn't get dirty again, i meticulously cleaned and dusted my entire dorm room and the laptop worked for two weeks straight, but then again it started giving me the cooling warning. took it back, he did it for free because he warrenties his work for 30 days. got it back, didn't even go a second without telling me the same thing. so i've been running leaving my windows open and chilling my entire room to keep the temp down, and it works most of the time, but now that spring is here, it might not work much longer.

i'm probably going to take it back to the guy this thursday/friday for the weekend, but i was wondering if i could get him to do, look at. or replace something like the fan or whatever other parts might be suspect.

i was also looking at one of those plug in laptop cooling bases that plug into the usb port or ac plug.

i mean, this laptop is practically a desktop pc, it never leaves the desk until the semester is over.

please help, i have no idea what to do. and how a computer really works.

and thank you for your advice in advance!

 

You could get a antec laptop cooling pad. those help out by a few degrees. But also take apart the laptop clean off the heat sink for the processor, reapply some artic silver thermal paste, that stuff is the best there is when it comes to thermal paste and helping with heat transfer from the processor to the heatsink

 

might wanna install a cold air intake on the side of your laptop. ;)

but seriously, try and find a cooling pad that uses ''liquid cooling''. I had a friend back in highschool who had a liquid cooling pad and the direct cooling is 100x better than anything a fan can do. iliquid cooling is teh uber cool.

 

i called the computer place, he said he already did the heat sink arctic silver paste dealie, but i'm still covered by his warrenty so he told me to bring it on in and he'll try to figure it out. thanks so far guys, keep any additional ideas coming!

 

sounds to me like you've got a bad bearing in your fan or fans, when it gets noisy there is resistance in the fan when it's spinning, and sometimes getting the dust out of the system can help, but if it's a few years old the fans are probably dying. Slower fans means less moving air which means more heat.

Kanundrum has it right, Arctic Silver 5 is the best when it comes to thermal paste, will most DEFINITELY drop the temps a good bit, but that requires taking apart the laptop, removing the heatsink on the processor on the motherboard and reassembling everything, and I'm not sure if you know how to do all that.

I would say the fans definitely need replacing without a doubt, and if you can buy some arctic silver and take it to that guy at the shop and have him install it, that will be even better but he might charge you as much as he already did since he has to take the whole thing apart again.

a Lapcooler is a great idea too, but it's better to fix the problem at the source.

I don't mean to direct people to websites but check out www.xoxide.com - they carry tons and tons of great stuff at good prices, and they have arctic silver 5 under "CPU Coolers>Thermal Paste" - their laptop coolers are under "Cooling Accessories>Notbook Cooling"

If you get a laptop cooler find one that is made out of aluminum for better heat transfer ONLY IF the bottom of your laptop is made out of aluminum or metal, if it's an HP it's made out of plastic, so theres really no reason to get a metal base, plastic doesn't transfer heat nearly at all.