Laptop for Poker

[silverslick]

I have a 2008 laptop and have been practising multi tabling more while clearing bonus offers on stars and tilt. After 30 minutes the laptop is struggling to perform starts to overheat and shuts itself down. Is their anything I can do to upgrade my current laptop or do I need to upgrade?

The problem was worse on tilt with Rush Poker so wondered if it was a graphics card issue.

If I go for a new laptop any advice?

[StuartHopkin]

How many tables?

2008 laptops shouldnt struggle with anything under 10 tables?

[silverslick]

It was only 5 on Pokerstars and 2 with Rush. I forgot to say the disk is 60% full but still 35GB free.

[StuartHopkin]

That should run fine imo.

Are you sure there isnt something wrong with programs running on the laptop.

Could you give it a big clean up, or even reformat and reload everything on?

[Longines]

The fan outlet and possibly the fan itself will be clogged with dust. This causes the processor to overheat when running multiple intensive tasks and eventually a thermal safety shut down occurs.

A) Google how to disassemble your laptop. Strip it down to the motherboard and clean out all the dust.

or

B) Buy a can of compressed air from Maplin and give the fan outlet a blast. Should move quite a bit of the dust.

[silverslick]

I have tidied up the disk and delted unused programs. The description of the fan makes sense, I will have a look at that.

Thanks

[bhoywonder]

Ur loaded.....ffs

Buy a new one..

[Shogun112]

I had an issue recently here my laptop was shutting down, just switch off, no warning, turned out it was overheating.  I loaded a program called 'Acronis Drive Monitor' and it was telling me the hard disk temp was just about 62 degrees as it shut down.  Max should have been 55 degrees.  I took off the base panel and it ran slightly cooler and 2-3 degrees cooler.  But that is still above specification.

When had disks get too hot, they are likely to cause a failure.  I only had a hard disk failure just over 1 month ago, so the overheting is an issue.

With my back panel off, I can see that the internal cooling fan is working just fine.  I use my laptop on the arm of my chair, so there is no gap below the laptop to vent properly.  If it is placed on a hard desk, there is a few mm of gap between laptop and desk where vented hot air can be vented properly.

I could also see, the more programmes I ran, the warmer it got on the drive monitor.

So...

I bought a laptop cooler.  It cost me £16. I had to buy a larger one because mine is an 18 inch laptop.  It is basically a base that the laptop sits on.  The base has 3 fans in the base.  It uses power from a USB port.  The one I got, the fans can be detatched and moved, so I moved the fans to the place where the vents are and the fans now push air into the vents.  I was careful not to put a fan near to the vent where the laptop fan blows outwards.  That would just cause a problem, 2 fans pushing against each other.

Now..  My laptop hard disk is running at 41 to 43 degrees and now well within 55 degree max tollerance and also, 1 week later, not a single shutdown since.

This is the one I got....  For the larger laptop...  http://www.scan.co.uk/products/coolermaster-notepal-u3-slim-notebook-cooler-black-silver-for-upto-19-laptops-movable-fan
It does not show a picture but a pic is here ( I went for the Slim ) .. http://www.scan.co.uk/products/coolermaster-notepal-u3-notebook-cooler-black

Alternately, they have a huge choice...  here... http://www.scan.co.uk/shop/computer-hardware/all/laptops-netbooks/stands-coolers

I am not in any way related to scan computers, just who i chose to get one of these off..

[Bully87]

Generally not a good idea to block up fan vents or leave laptops on soft services.
Dismantling laptops is generally easy to do so taking it apart and giving it a good clean will do it good. Just remember where the screws went!!

I sit mine on my National Record of Achievement with a double cell battery to let air vent underneath it, I knew it'd come in handy one day...

[RED-DOG]

sorry I'm late, and thanks to StuartHopkin for alerting me to this thread.

Have you tried turning it off and on?

[silverslick]

Thanks for the advice, dust was the problem causing the overheating. I clleared iit as best I could manually and it has not shit down since. Also have the compressed air on order to do it properly. Will have a look at the coolers as well.

Appreciate the advice

[Supernova]

I picked up a usb laptop cooler from  my local Tesco, it was £13.00 I think.

[Spraggs]

I clleared iit as best I could manually and it has not shit down since.

you've definitelygot problems if its doing that!

[TFMonty]

if its anything like my older computers then over time you will have downloaded various things that run in the background everytime you load up, skype, msn, java etc over the years these add up and can take up a load of processor power so i would check what process you have run in the background and remove some of them to free up memory capacity.