Overheating protection in Elitebook 840 G2?

I've been using 2nd generation of Elitebook 840 for couple of months now. Today I accidentally did quite a stupid thing and I'd like to get your comments on potential outcome (if any).

I was at a long (9 hrs!!!) meeting with my laptop on, but one the very last presentation I closed its lid in order not the use the battery for screen display. I've set up my device not to react (e.g. shut down or sleep) when the lid is closed, so it stayed on. After this last presentation (don't blame me! ) I simply grabbed my laptop, put it into my bag (equipped with a special laptop pocket) and left the meeting place quickly. As you can image I completely forgot to turn it off , so it was working all the time, though no programs were running on it (except from File Explorer).

I've realized it about 1,5 hours later when got back to my hotel. It turned out that the laptop was working all that time and got extremely hot (the hot air had nowhere to go in the pocket), I'd even say it was a bit too hot to touch it for a longer time. Of course I turned it off immediately to cool it down.

I've got two concerns:

• the cooling fan was not working even though the device temperature was extreme - it's not broken, as it works now when I'm writing this and a big rar archive is being created;
• the laptop did not shut down automatically to prevent overheating and I'm pretty sure all modern laptops have anti-heat protection build in (say Intel processors definitely have it).

Can you comment on that? Isn't that strange that the laptop didn't shut down being so hot? Is there any possibility something inside might have got broken as a result of this?

I realize this may be a pure speculation, but still...

 

The laptop will shut itself down once it reaches around 100C, if it didn't then it didn't reach that temperature yet.
Something will feel hot to touch above 40C which would have been the case for the entire laptop since the heat would have warmed everything evenly.

The laptop did not get warm enough to turn off as meassured by the CPU and motherboard, they are designed to handle heat.
There may be other components though that do not handle heat as well as the CPU does and that is where the damage may have been done.
This will maybe result in slightly less lifespan of a component.

I wouldn't worry too much though as the elitebooks will still last you longer than normal laptops and if it doesn't you have a 3 year warranty to cover any defect.

 

That's a good news, thank you!

In fact I was quite worried as I saw BSOD today and immediately referred it to yesterday incident. But it looks it was something different...

 

Keep an eye on it and if you get any more install Windows 7 or 8 again.
If it then still happens you should contact HP.