my laptop is now about a year old, and up until about a month ago it never turned itself off, now it just shuts off without even shutting down if i use my laptop on my knee because of the heat. does anyone know why this has suddenly started or how to stop it.
let me guess, pentium 4, probably a dell? this may not apply to you, but a p4 should really never be used in a laptop, they just generate way too much heat. i found out the hard way with my dell laptop, it worked for a little while until it got a little bit dusty and it turned into a space heater. my friend had problems with his shutting down and such. you can temporarily solve the problem with some compressed air. it seems dust has a huge effect on the problem. i don't know where you are at now, but maybe you can swap out laptops if you have a warrenty or something. if you can, go with a "real" mobile cpu. like a pentium m or amd turion.
Rooster's right, It's most likely dust and "crud" buildup. I have a Toshiba Satellite with a pentium 4 2.4Ghz proc. Started having overheating-related shutdowns. I opened the cover on the bottom of the laptop covering the processor, and removed the heatsink. Then I THOROUGHLY cleaned the heatsink, applied Arctic Silver 5 to the heatsink, and reinstalled it. Voila! No more overheating problems. The pentium 4 processor runs very hot to begin with, and the heatsink on the Toshiba gets pretty nasty, which just compounds the problem.
