Yeesh! Overheat!

I got this Dell Inspiron 1300 laptop a few years ago, and for a while now it just randomly shuts down. Once when it shut down, I felt the bottom of the laptop was burning. When I got MobileMeter, my laptop was plugged in and it read around 94° Celcius. But when its unplugged, it goes down to around 86°C. Is there any way I can stop it from overheating?

 

Check out the cooling guide.

 

I know someone who got his replaced under warranty because of the overheating.

As Johnny said, check it out, but make sure that nothing is actually going to go on fire due to wear/defect, regardless of your cooling methods.

 

There is really nothing wrong with the computer. I have had the same problem recently when my Dell started to shut down out of the blue. It turns out that in my case at least the fan to heat sink link was blocked by the usual dust blanket that fans pick up. I had to power down completely, carefully use an anti-static mat and earth connection, remove the cover to the processor, remove the heat sink and clean out the "mat" of dust particles gathered between the fan and the heat sink. I carefully reassembled everything and everything was fine again. I had noticed a large decline in performance and was going about looking for viruses etc, turns out this was the problem.

The whole process takes about 5 minutes start to finish.

 

Regardless of whether it has dust in it or not, it's worth getting Dell to look at and even maybe replace / fix it.

it doesn't hurt to try and you might save yourself an exploding fiery laptop fiasco.

 

I doubt it is under warranty still.