What Happens When a Laptop Overheats?

Video Transcript

"I'm Jonathan Ayres with Network For Success, and today we're going to talk about what happens when a laptop overheats. Well I have a laptop right here in front of me, it's an Apple. And if you'll look at where I'm pointing, this entire area is the battery for the laptop. Now when you're typing on the laptop and using it for anything, this battery gets hot just by using the electricity, what we call discharging. And as it gets hot this heat has to go somewhere, and it wants to go straight downwards. So for example if you have this on your lap and there's no place for this heat to go, it starts to build up, and the computer gets hotter and hotter and hotter. This can happen on a table or on your lap. If it's on your lap, generally it gets hot enough that you take it off your legs and then that helps it cool down again, but you may not, and it's very possible that the computer can get so hot that it would stop operating because it would turn itself off automatically. Now lets look at how some people have come up with some solutions to deal with this. Now one solution, when your computer is on a table, is to buy a piece of equipment that the computer sits on. Here's an example. This is a plastic device that has three fans in it, and it connects through this cable to your computer, and when you plug it in and turn it on, it draws the heat away from the bottom of the computer and exhaust it out the back side. And this keeps your computer perfectly cool when you're working on a desktop or even on your laptop. Now lets look at another situation. We have here a Dell laptop, and Dell laptops also have batteries underneath, and they have the same problems. But let me show you a problem that's particular to Dell. When Dell's get hot, and here's their battery once again, a Dell has their memory sitting right in the center underneath and it's very close to the battery, and it has been common with these units, that when they get very hot this memory card gets hot and it starts to lift up, because the processor is right underneath it, and it's hot. And there were some models that Dell made in the past, where the processor would actually pop out of its socket and turn the computer off. So there are some drawbacks to having a laptop overheat, and those are some of the things that can happen when they overheat. So what are we talking about? We're talking about burned legs, it's a problem, computer just being too hot to set anywhere down that you would touch it, we're talking about possible turning itself off without any notice, maybe losing information you're working on. We're talking about possibly popping a processor memory out and turning itself off. So it's a good idea to try to keep your laptop as cool as possible."