cooling question

not really sure which forum it belonged to but...

i was wondering if i could point a little USB fan i have to blow cold air into the side vent that the hot air comes out of, to help cool it down

or would that trap the hot air inside and fry my laptop?

 

They have made fans gadgets similar to what you asked about, and they have been ineffective at that time. I suggest instead looking into repasting the heatsink and possibly looking into a notebook cooler pad. I'd do the repaste first, clean out the fans etc.

 

i already have a cooling pad, the bottom of the laptop is cold now, but warm/hot air still comes out of the exhaust/exit vent on the side of the laptop

im just asking if its safe to blow cold air into the exhaust vent on the side using my little fan, ie. will the fan pushing cold air inside trap the hot air trying to get out and wreck my laptop etc etc

 

Blowing air into the exhaust vent will do you little to no good. Blowing air into the intake vent will help a little bit. Blowing air on the chassis (or sucking it away) near the processor and GPU will help a bit. Cleaning out the fan and heatsink assembly and maybe repasting your CPU will ensure optimal cooling, making external coolers redundant in the case of most laptops.

You can also check your temps in a free program like CPU-ID's Hardware Monitor to see whether or not temperature is really an issue in your everyday workload. It sounds like your machine is probably running just fine - a running CPU and/or GPU always puts off some heat, so it's perfectly normal for some warm air to come out of the vent. If you don't like that, then cleaning, repasting, and externally cooling the laptop will minimize the temperature of that exhaust air.

And yes, there are products like what you're asking about - you'd probably want a USB-powered fan that you could set up behind your laptop wherever the intake vent is located.

 

Just to reiterate - you don't want to blow air into the exhaust (where the hot air is coming out) - the whole point is to increase the air through your laptop to improve cooling, and blowing air into the exhaust would have the opposite effect. As mentioned, blowing air into the intakes might help. (Oh, and don't sweat that the air coming out of the exhaust is hot, unless it's REALLY hot - remember, it's carrying the heat away from your laptop components, so the exhaust air is going to be warm if the laptop's cooling mechanisms are doing their jobs!)

 

firstly what laptop have you got and when was the last time you cleaned the vents and fans out.
this needs to be done on a regular basis to keep temps down but as its been mentioned on here some suppliers actually void your warranty if you open the base which is totally pathetic as this needs to be done.

so what lappy have you got first.
also what sort of temperatures are you getting. you can find lots of free monitoring software in my sig below. post your results on cpu/gpu/hdd
also what part of the world are you from as if its summer where you are then ambient temps will be a lot higher.