Notebook suddenly overheating

My wife has used her Asus everynight for months surfing the net with no trouble at all. Now, tonight for the first time, it got blistering hot. Any ideas? It is kept on a passive cooler.

 

Might have something to do with the ventilation, if the vent got blocked by anything that could make it less efficient, your laptop will start overheating.

Funny it happened to me just a few days ago, my GPU suddenly jumped to 86 C while playing Dragon age(normally it maxed at 76C), I got no idea what was going on as I clean the internals of the laptop quite often, but still I opened up my laptop again and cleaned it with a can of compressed air, surprisingly there were a few tiny pieces of dust like things coming out of the vent, don't know what it was and no idea how it got in there, anyway I checked the temp again thereafter, the temp goes normal again.

 

thanks I will check that.

 

Thought most netbooks were passively cooled anyway.

Check the temperatures with HWmonitor, as I've seen failing hard drives give off an extreme amount of heat (aka 70C, so hot where it through the palm rest)

 

The original post says it is an Asus NOTEbook, not a NETbook.

FWIW, my Asus NETbook has a cooling fan. To the best of my knowledge, most older netbooks DO have a fan. Perhaps many of the newer ones don't (I have no idea).

 

Have you tried blowing out the vents with canned air? And as said above, use HWMonitor to see what parts are causing the heat. That will give some clues.

 

I assumed by surfing the web it was a netbook. I swear I saw netbook but I did come home from a concert last night at 2 am and am running on like 3 hours of sleep.

Older netbooks are passively cooled, N270 is a 2 watt TDP processor though it did run pretty hot.

 

Maybe my N270 netbook is the oddball, having a cooling fan. I dunno for sure. But even Asus' original Eee PC 700 had a cooling fan, if memory serves. Perhaps it is just Asus is big on cooling fans for netbooks.

 

Any recent updates? Also consider if anything else (location, operation, programs) have changed since you noticed the problem. All of these can have an effect on how hard your machine operates.

 

Or maybe he's not replying cause his notebook exploded.

 

Do you know where I can download this?

 

I am going to do the canned air next I tried the vacuum cleaner but no results

 

Im actually responding on another computer. No change in location, OS or programs used. Only difference is in web surfing using Firefox instead of IE

 

Google "HWMonitor"

 

Get it here.