Sunday, December 25, 2011

How to stop laptop overheating, if still overheats after cleaning dust.


There is two kinds of overheating.
  1. Component specific overheating, caused by CPU or Graphics Processing Unit (GPU).
  2. Overall temperature inside the laptop, caused by HDD and Battery.


99.9% cases its CPU,GPU or North bridge (if no GPU present). But in these 99.9% cases sometimes its not just gets fixed by cleaning the dust from heat-sink vents.


I am assuming you failed to fix overheating problem by following-
  • Removing dust from laptop heat sink.
  • Changed fan settings in CMOS.
  • Update the bios with new version.
  • Replaced the CPU cooling fan and graphics processing unit cooling fan (if present)
  • Tried a costly branded thermal past or thermal pad.
Overheating happens because of dust, fan failure, loose heat-sink or broken heat-sink. Laptop gets overheat even if you don't run heavy CPU intesive software or graphics on the laptop and all above listed things seems okay.

But Laptop produce huge heat even you runing on lightweight programs like notepad or working on CMOS setup screen. This problem is with all the laptops those come with the graphics chip. When the BGA graphics chip get little dry-solder or comes to the end of the life.

Overheating is the most common reason when you see your laptop work for a while and then  freeze up, shut down on its own or even restarts while still plugged in charging. It all caused by CPU overheating.

If CPU overheats then first of all try to change it with same working CPU. If Same problem exists after replacing the CPU then change the CPU core voltage VRM section's SMD electrolytic capacitor or PTH (non SMD) electrolytic capacitor placed near the CPU socket.



In the case of GPU overheats it usually hangs or restarts. IF you having problem with graphics processor you Just wait for when your laptop GPU goes down. Then it will be the right time to re-ball or re-flow the GPU chip. Or you can extend the life of your GPU chip just following these instructions.Heat is a killer for electronic devices and Laptop cooling fan play a most important role to save the life of laptop. Manufacturer use a smart fan circuit for their cooling fan and fan speed is also controllable. So a well designed laptop will run the fan just fast enough to keep the temperature in the ideal operating range. But as laptop grow older it's effects the fan performance also.

Let see what we can do for expanding the life of our laptop if it's nearing the end life of it's motherboard. In my last post I was talking about the CPU cooling fan.
This is the most powerful part of our laptop that can make a laptop life long and smooth. so I am going to do something with the CPU cooling fan smart circuits that usually control CPU cooling fan speed so if laptop gets overheat it means there is something missing or wrong.

In very easy way we can ride over the smart fan controller circuit just disconnect the PWM controller pin from fan header it's very easy way to prevent our laptop from overheat.
After the opening connection of PWM signal fan runs on the same speed it's never gets down in the normal mode but it will be remain off if smart fan circuit will stop fan.
We just bypass the fan speed control some time laptop gets overheat after repairing motherboard BGA chip, Re-ball the GPU or North-bridge due to faulty chip or if it not placed perfectly on motherboard then also we have to bypass the cooling fan for good ventilation.

Hope this helps let me know problems/queries in comments section below.