What to Do When Your Laptop Keeps Overheating

Whether you’re looking to add thermal pads, apply thermal paste, or do both, your best bet is to look up a tutorial for your specific laptop, as you would for any repair.

Do less

It’s natural for us to push our computers, especially if we’re doing multiple things at once. The above methods should improve your device performance naturally, so you might be able to run more apps anyway. However, even with these cooling strategies, your laptop might not be able to handle the multitude of programs you have running at any given point.

If you keep too many Chrome tabs open, for example, try only keeping the ones you really need open. If you don’t need to keep your game of The Sims running in the background while you’re working, keep it closed until it’s time to play again. If you want to edit video, but overheating causes slowdowns, try closing all apps but the ones necessary for the editing project.

Being mindful of how your use your laptop can go a long way towards keeping things cool, especially the longer your keep your machine.