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I have a Dell studio 1555 laptop with Core2 Duo CPU & ATI Radeon 4500 series GPU. I run Windows 7.

Recently, when I boot my laptop, I foud it missing its display and I took it to a laptop service center. The technician told me that it was due to laptop heating and is a common fault. Then he made a hot air blow to GPU chips, and after cooling, the display came back. Then I told him to set fan speed to 100% to prevent over heating in future. Since there was no option for fan speed in BIOS, he made it manually.

Is this a good practice to set notebook fan speed to 100%? Will this setting prevent my notebook from overheating in future? Will I encounter with the same trouble again?

karel
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Alfred
  • 710

1 Answers1

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Generally it is not necessary. Laptops are engineered to keep cool, and thinks like cool-and-quiet and variable fan speeds keep the power and fan levels just about right.

The biggest problem I see with laptop design, is that the fans have a long exhaust route. The exhaust tends to fill with dust (sometimes hair) and that disrupts the cooling. To some extent this is a non-issue as the fans will spin a little faster to compensate.

Best bet is to occasionally blow out the fans and exhaust (and intake when there is an obvious one). This will keep the airflow as designed and do more good than an always 100% fan, which may keep the laptop cooler (good), but also drain the battery faster.

Austin T French
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