How to Lower Your Laptop Temperature

Do you find your laptop hotter than before? Does your laptop always blow hot air from the vent even you don’t use any heavy duty program? Do you feel your laptop keyboard or touchpad getting hotter?

A hot laptop usually means a short life span laptop. You should always keep your laptop temperature low to prolong its life span. Using a cool laptop feels better too. You won’t feel as if your laptop just came out from the oven.

So what should you do if your laptop gets hotter than before? Here is a simple tip to lower your laptop temperature in one minute.

It started with my younger brother having some software problem on my old Acer laptop. He was in China. So the computer technician helped to format and reinstall the operating system. But after that, he found the laptop was quite hot. Even the keyboard and touch pad was hot. So he used a laptop cooler with fans.

When he came back, my another younger brother found out the real culprit for this heat problem. It was caused by Windows Power Management setting! The power scheme was set to “Home/Office Desk”. Setting it back to “Portable/Laptop” solved the problem immediately.

Before this, I thought the Power scheme is only a preset of timeout setting for turning off monitor, turning off hard disk, system standby and hibernate. Apparently, it does more than that. Choosing “Portable/Laptop” power scheme lets Windows know this is a laptop. So Windows will adjust its operating environment to save power and therefore, reduce temperature.

How to set the power scheme for your laptop?

For Windows XP, go to Start -> Control Panel and double click on “Power Options”. Under “Power schemes” section, select “Portable/Laptop” and click “OK”. Another simpler method is to left click on the Power taskbar icon and select the required setting.



For Windows Vista, the step should be roughly the same.

Just today, one of my relative with Acer laptop also experiences hot laptop. Hot air keep blowing out from her laptop fan. And she placed a laptop cooler at the bottom too. At first I thought it was the problem with Acer laptop. But then I remember the Power scheme setting. So I checked her power setting and it was set to “Always On”. After I changed the setting to “Portable/Laptop”, her laptop fan stopped blowing hot air after a few seconds.

So if you have similar problem, you may want to check your power scheme setting. Remember to set it to “Portable/Laptop”.

You can also check the program running on background. If possible, reduce your background program to minimum to reduce CPU work load. If a program crashed, CPU work load may be increased by 50% too.