Cooling a hot laptop?

[spcnoyes]

what are some ways i can cool my laptop? i have a cooling pad, but i'm soon to be in 100F+ temps everyday, so i want to keep my laptop as cool as possible. any ways to have my fans turn on at a lower temperature or anything? power is not an option, as i always have my laptop plugged in.
HP Pavillion zd8000 (zd8215 from bestbuy)

[mjolnir1134]

I have a Dell Inspiron 1100, and it sure does compare to a waffle iron.

What I do is open it up and clean the dust out with compressed air and probably wipe with a plain unscented tissue...

And I have also applied new thermal solution to the CPU surface as well (after cleaning off the CPU and heatsink of the old)



Oh, and it sure does cool it down a tad and quiets down the fans...

Its been overheating again lately, I need to try again (applying thermal was not one of my strong points in computer fixin' )

[johnnyis42]

i have an alienware area51m, and after about 18 months is was having periodic random crashes with games, somehting it had never done before.

well, after 18 months i finally decided to examine it to see how air flow was handled, and low and behold there was dust clogging the main intake it used to blow outside air through the heas sinks of the processor and video card.

blew that stuff out and problem solved.

those cooling pads help keep you cool if you literally have the laptop on your lap, but they do little to cool the laptop since all they do is provide cool air to the outside of the laptop chassis, and the heat that is causing the problem is usually trapped inside the laptop itself.

those HP laptops are a real pain to get into compared to my alientward and most dells, so be careful if you decide to open it up. usually finding the air intake and outputs and hitting those with compressed air will do the job, but i have seen HP's with the main cpu heat sink/air dam so clogged, the dust looked like an air filter because it was so compressed together after years of use.