Can having a laptop on your lap too long cause it to overheat?

A laptop on any hard surface without ventilation can cause it to get uncomfortably hot - although I have never heard of one shutting down because of it.

On the same issue, I have heard all that heat will do nothing for your fertility levels if you are a male. Be careful.

It shouldn't. Mine has a vent on the side and on the bottom and I always just make sure there is nothing covering it up. I have a toshiba and use it in my lap a lot and never had any problems. I dont even notice it getting the least bit warm.

I don't have that problem, all I use is my laptop.

My friend has an older Dell Inspiron laptop that got a virus on it...it was causing his computer to overheat because it made the CPU run at 100%. After 10 minutes, it would reboot, and then keep rebooting, until it was turned off and left alone to cool. He eventually had it reformatted, and its fine, but he went out and bought himself something similar to this.

Just as a side note...

AJ

Mine does, mainly if running high load programs. Just tend to make sure its on a hard surface, though I actually bought a cheap cooling pad and its worked wonders.
(Mine has been a bit worse than usual lately so I think its about time for me to open it up and renew the heatsink paste)

Normaly using the laptop on a desk of on your lap makes no differens to the heating of the laptop.
the only things that makes differens are the ventilation and the CPU use.
A friend had a problem with his laptop that windows said there was a heat problem after 15 a 20 min.
The problem was that the ventilation holes where filled with dust and ....
After cleaning this the laptop worked perfectly.

I had Terragen 2 running on my school Dell laptop, and I put it in my book bag between classes while it was rendering. TG2 is pretty CPU heavy, running at least 80% on the laptop(although its not the best) When I got it back out 5 minutes later, it had cut off. I assume it overheated, but it's hard to tell because it would randomly bring up the blue screens, or "die".

I heard about someone on a plane had his laptop on his lap, and then his legs caught on fire from the laptop overheating. But, you can buy cooling pads like the ones above, there was one on tv that you put in the freezer.

I would just say that as long as there is proper ventilation in the laptop, it should be fine

Having a laptop on your lap can kill semen, lol.
I don't think it may overheat though, your not blocking a fan are you?

I didn't just make the whole subject up...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4078895.stm

The subject is well documented. Try doing a google search.

Thats the problem though, alot have the fan on the bottom.

Yeah, there is a fan on the back, one on the side, and I think there may be one on the bottom.

if you fans are in the bottom then you have a retarded laptop lol, i hope it wasent too costly.

anyways.. there are some like book type things with fans that you put it below you computer so that wont casue a problem... and i guess you need it

Hi! I know this subject has been dormant for a while, but I thought I'd share a bit of my own anecdotal evidence on the subject. I bought two Toshiba laptops about 18 months back to replace a couple of aged noisy XP boxes. One my son used for schoolwork and some lightweight browser gaming (we have separate Games machine plus the odd console...) and the other one sat alongside my work laptop and shares the mess of my study area along with monitor, keyboard and mouse via a KVM switch...

About 6 months back, the laptop on my desk started getting really noisy when it tried to do anything vaguely CPU intensive, like an AV scan, and then moved on to shutting down. From the scorching heat on the base of the laptop, even I could work out there was a heat problem. Initially I just tried to reduce the CPU performance of the AV scan but it kept on happening, so I moved on to a laptop cooler base - a raised base with 3 usb fans to move the air around, but even that hasn't been enough in the warmest parts of the summer...

Then a few days back I started rummaging around for an answer (again), having decided that I would have one last try before giving up on the machine (new laptop versus repair costs including new power supply pretty much even out...) I saw an article or two about dust clogging up the laptop cooling fans and vents that I hadn't seen previously. I suspect you can see where this is going... Yesterday afternoon I disconnected all the cables and took the laptop off it's stand and took a look at it - very dusty underneath. One of the threads I found recommended using a compressed air canister to blow through the air vents but I wasn't organised enough for that - no can - so I just tried blowing through the intake vents on the side and - tada! - I have dust bunnies coming out of the fan port! After several iterations of blowing, picking lumps out with tweezers and using a mini vacuum cleaner on it, the dust clouds dissapated... I then did a good clean around the whole area (it had to happen sometime..)

Strangely enough the laptop is running much quieter now, not even getting excited about the latest AV scan...

Methinks a better housekeeping situation around my study area might help...

I offer my experience as a potential solution to others who may have a laptop that has similar issues that could also have an attack of dust bunnies...

Basically working with your laptop in your lap would not cause the laptop to heat except if the fans are at the bottom then it will also heat up while just on a table. So heating up is not caused by your laps. High end applications and softwares and the number of processor cycles and processes causes the machine to generate heat which if the vents are blocked you might feel warm or even hot on your laps as your machine absorbs the heat. Continual absorption of this heat causes the machine to slow down and then eventually shuts down when the shutdown threshold temperature is reached.

Laps don't cause laptops to heat.

Except if its sat on the table the feet on the bottom raise it up off the surface allowing normal airflow.

inside cleaning..i read last year thta the cpu has to be clean and thermal paste has to be clean and replace..plus vents,from inside out.

Or get one of those laptop stand like things I remember Dennis posting about some time ago that raises them up allowing for good airflow.

I use a cooling pad the whole time when using my laptop at home.

Unless is out of warranty or you know what you are doing you probably Shouldn't be replacing thermal paste on a laptop as you would probably void it....
With a desktop pc its a different story, you will find it easier as desktops are meant to be user accessible to a good degree.

I had this problem... mostly because the intake vents are on the bottom and the outward one is on the side. And this is when I tried to run Oblivion on the poor thing (integrated video cards aren't fun at all). I either use a wooden board or a nice plastic minidesk that sits on top of my lap now and don't have problems with it. Mostly depends on the type of work you're doing.