Laptop becomes sluggish, loud, and hot after 15 min's.

[FreshCoconut]

My Laptop is a HP Pavilion, around 6 years old, every time i turn it on for about 15 mins it becomes sluggish, loud and quite hot, i can feel the heat on the table after lifting the laptop up. Anyone know what the problem might be? Thanks.

 

[Ketchup]

Start with a can of compressed and and blowing through the openings in the side and the bottom. It might be most if you do this with the laptop still running. Just be careful to avoid jarring movements.

If you continue encountering this issue, open up task manager and see if this CPU is running at (or close to) 100%. If it is, go to the processes tab, select "show processes for all users," and see which one is running the highest CPU.

 

[Zodiark1593]

Depending on how much dust is in there, and your power settings, you can see the processor throttle back to 600 MHz and even lower (I've seen clocks as low as 133 MHz under severe throttling).

Power saver mode (and possibly the stock OEM mode) favors throttling the cpu to reduce heat instead of ramping up the fan. Obviously, if the heatsink is caked with 6 years worth of dust, heat isn't going anywhere anytime soon, and neither is your pc for that matter.

 

[John Connor]

Any crap running in task manager? Autoruns will tell you what is starting up.

Besides dust those would be the most likely problems.

 

[Eelectricity]

Do you have fans underneath? Sometimes those fail. Other than that all good advice from others. Blow it out! Dust is #1 problem with overheating laptops.

 

[Ketchup]

...Dust is #1 problem with overheating laptops.

That and running it on the bed, lol.

 

[Eelectricity]

That and running it on the bed

There is that. The OP did mention table.

I also realize they mentioned "loud" so I guess the fans are working so my previous advice about checking fans is probably not needed but it's easy enough to check the fans on the bottom.

 

[dionasaur]

HP Laptops from around that time-frame usually are known to have overheating issues. The fans inside the laptop are fairly weak. You can certainly try using compressed air to get the dust out.

What is the exact model number of the laptop?

 

[Ketchup]

HP Laptops from around that time-frame usually are known to have overheating issues...

Especially if it has AMD internals.

 

[VirtualLarry]

That and running it on the bed, lol.

That's one reason I got a Bay Trail for my "bed" laptop.