Constant Overheating Even with a Cooler!

[og5]

I have a Compaq Presario C700 series. I bought it one year ago and it barely made a whisper. These days I have a Zalmann ZM NC 1000 notebook cooler on at at max capacity and the notebook still overheats like crazy. Sometimes I'll need to shut it down after only an hour because otherwise it will get too hot and shut off.

What is usually the problem that causes overheating? I know CPU usage has to do with it, and playing videos definitely makes the laptop overheat. But right now I have this broswer window open and notepad, nothing else. Yet the laptop is feeling like it will shut off in 15 minutes!?

I forgot to mention, no mods except for bumping up the memory from 2 to 3 GB

 

[Yami]

It's possibly just badly designed, but could be the inside is really dusty. A dust buildup would explain why it used to be good but has gotten worse over time. I don't have any experience in dusting laptops so I won't give you advice for fear of getting it wrong

You could try underclocking the CPU, it would use less power then but would also be slower.

 

[NightSurge]

Is your actual laptop fans running? Overtime they could have stopped working or gotten clogged with dust. If that's the case even a laptop fan won't help since all the heat collects inside and the laptop fan mostly cools the outside with only a little penetration.

 

[og5]

Is your actual laptop fans running? Overtime they could have stopped working or gotten clogged with dust. If that's the case even a laptop fan won't help since all the heat collects inside and the laptop fan mostly cools the outside with only a little penetration.

the fans are definitely running. I guess dust buildup would probably be the culprit, I was also thinking that there are too many background processes running but I don't know how to check that accurately (the task manager shows 1-4% CPU usage with spikes whenever i do something, and only 1.35 gb of memory used (less than half)

 

[Yami]

If you're worried about background processes, go to the Run prompt, enter 'msconfig' and stop stuff in Startup and Services that you don't want running all the time.