Lab46 Wiki

Troubleshooting an overheating laptop

One of the worst things that can happen to a laptop is overheating. This is more of an issue in laptops because of the tiny case they are in and difficulty in cooling. My laptop had was overheating so bad it was shutting down as a safety feature. I decided to try and figure out what the problem was in the hopes of fixing it so that I did not have to spend the money to buy a new one. I was ultimately able to figure out the problem and get it fixed, this is what I did:
- The first thing I did is checked to see if I could physically hear the cooling fan running and it did not sound like it was spinning.
- I then checked the bios to see if it had any options related to the cooling of the fan, the only option I found was an option called “fan always on”, it was disabled so I switched to enabled and rebooted. Despite the case physically being hot the fan still did not turn on and the laptop would quickly shut down giving me little software related options of troubleshooting.
- At this point I decided my only option was to try and take the laptop apart, something I try to avoid as laptop cases can be finicky
- After some trial and error(figuring out which screws needed to come out to remove the keyboard) I was able to get access to a section of the fan.
- I tried to manually spin the fan and it was extremely difficult to do so
- I continued spinning to see if I could figure out what the problem was and finally I noticed that there was cat hair wrapped around the fan(stupid cats)
- At this point I took some tweezers and slowly pulled all the cat hair out of the fan(it was quite a lot of hair).
- after pulling out as much of the hair as I could(about a handful) The fan seemed to spin no problem.
- I didnt want to put the laptop back together without fully testing so I powered on as it stood and the fan came on immediately.
- Just to be safe I let the unite run for a half an hour and saw no slow down or any hang ups with the fan.
- As an added precaution I used the air duster to blow out any excess dust and debris.
- At this point it looked as if I had saved the laptop so I put everything back together and began enjoying having a functioning laptop.

This just goes to show you how having a little guts and ingenuity can save you. I was thinking I might need a new fan if not a new laptop but was able to fix it without spending a dime and within a fairly short amount of time. It's been a month since I fixed the laptop and so far I have had no problems with it, except some numbers on the keypad no longer work. They were possibly damaged when we took the keyboard off the laptop, to me this was a reasonable trade off as I hardly use it anyway but it did make this a non perfect troubleshoot and repair.