Today's topic is around how to protect your laptop from overheating. Unsurprisingly, when you try to pack that many electronic components in such a small space, heat will become a real problem.

But other than getting burns on your skin from an overheated laptop, how do you know your laptop is actually too hot? One easy thing to keep an eye on is your CPU temperatures. It’s quite normal to see your CPU heat up under heavy use.

But if your laptop feels painfully hot or if it’s behaving strangely, download a reputable hardware monitoring utility (Windows), or Intel Power Gadget (macOS), and check your processor’s core temperatures by running it in the background.

Intel has specified temperatures around 100° Celsius as a maximum, but a good rule of thumb is that if you’re getting over 90° Celsius under load, you should probably try to cool your laptop down.

The processor temperatures aren’t the only thing to watch out for. Batteries don’t particularly like excessive heat either. And their tolerances are lower than they are for CPUs. The lithium-ion batteries common in modern electronics should be kept below 45° Celsius. Although they can operate at higher temperatures, up to around 60° Celsius or so, some laptops will stop charging once the battery temperature hits 45° Celsius. If your battery is often running at high temperature under load, its life might be shortened, and it might even swell upon you, like physically get larger, which can damage other laptop components.

And on the subject of high temperatures causing deformation, heat can actually cause the soldering inside the machine to crack or warp. Infamously, this phenomenon was at the center of a controversy that happened a little over a decade ago, called #BUMPGATE, that involved Nvidia and Apple. Nvidia sold a bunch of GPUs to Apple that turned out to be defective, but the issue wasn’t the GPU dies themselves. Instead, the soldering that held the die on to its package, arranged into small balls called bumps, was apparently made of a different material that didn’t behave in a way Nvidia expected once they heated up. As a result, many of these bumps expanded excessively, leading them to break entirely. Some reports indicated that failure rates were high as 40%. To this day, relations between Apple and Nvidia are rumored to be quite bumpy. And Apple started switching many of its Macs to AMD GPUs in the wake of #BUMPGATE, though it’s never been confirmed exactly how big of a role that particular incident played.

Back to the heat inside your laptop. We know that it’s bad. But if your monitoring tool indicates your temperatures are too high, how do you cool things off?  Well, you start off with the simple things, you can check the ambient temperature of the room you’re in, try operating your laptop on a hard, level surface to ensure that the air vents will have clearance to breathe, and blow out those vents with some compressed air to make sure they aren’t clogged with dust.

And if you’re still scratching your head, you can submit the laptop to our IT team for an in-depth analysis where we’ll pop off the panel, remove any dust or debris, and ensure all the fans are running properly and aren’t unplugged or straight-up dead. 

Note: A good laptop stand or cooling pad to sit your laptop on might be a good idea. You don’t necessarily need anything super expensive. Just find something well-reviewed.