Restart in game

It seems my laptop is overheating when I start up a game. It only lasts a few minutes, and then restarts. I have a cooling fan on the bottom and have it pretty well ventilated. I had this problem before, only the comp lasted longer. I fixed it by blowing out all the dust through the vents. I'm thinking mabye the dust buildup is pretty bad in there and I may have to open it up to completely blow it out. Any suggestions? Maybe a software problem? I have the box unchecked under system failure/automatically restart. Please help.

 

you should open and vacuum everything. I had a similar problem, but got it solve when i removed all the dust accumulated between the sink and the cooler
Be sure to adjust the sink correctly to the mother because if not temperature will get higher

 

Try vacuuming without opening the vents, and see if it persists. What game are you trying to run, and what are the specs on your laptop.

 

Agreed, if you are going to pull it apart, i.e. overheating seems to still be occuring you may want to remove the heatsink and refresh the thermal grease. I always run a system monitor, e.g. EVEREST Home, and tap the "Windows" every now and then to assess the temps and then pop back into the game.

EVEREST:

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=4181

An excellent generic link for the disassembly of laptops just flick through the different models until you find a similar one but the principle components will be very similar just different layouts:

http://www.irisvista.com/
and
http://repair4laptop.org/notebook_hard_drive.html

I generally layout white paper on the desk and then put the different screws and components in different sections. Hope this helps

 

If you have a digital camera capable of video, you might consider taking a film of the disassembly of the laptop. That way if you have problems, you can simply rewind the video.

 

Thanks for the info. I'm just afraid of messing something up in the dissasembly, although I'm rather good at that sort of thing... Anyways, I've been keeping it well ventilated and have a small fan blowing into the back vents while in-game. That has been working pretty well. Noisy though. As far as games go, I'm playing WoW, CS, DoD, HL2 and such. My system specs are as follows:

Dell XPS Gen 2
2.0 Ghz Intel Centrino
1 GB RAM
100 GB HD
256 MB nVidia Geforce 6800 Go Ultra
WUXGA (1920 x 1200) display

That's all I can remember for now. I'm not using it at the moment, so I'll have to get back to you if you need more info.