Laptop getting hot, fan running most of the time

Hardware and technical stuff
1

Guys - I have a Dell Latitude E6500 laptop that’s about three years old. For the past handful of weeks, I’ve noticed that it’s getting a lot hotter than it used to, and the fan is running almost constantly. What could cause this? I have shut down every unnecessary background program. Could there be hardware trouble inside?

Thanks!

2

Some typical reasons:

  • Fan is clogged, and hopefully not broken. There are numerous guides on the net on how to disassemble the laptop enough to clear the area around the fan and ensure it’s cleaned well.
  • You’re driving something graphics or CPU intensive, or running heavy graphics on an external display, or something written in java, a web browser running a large scripted page, or even some strangely acting programs (iTunes will do this.) See if you can only run minimal items and verify that it’s not something you are doing purposefully. I have the same model laptop you do for work, for me it’s iTunes, a couple of java coded items that I use for my job, and any game I try to cripple my laptop with. The fan will crank so high it sounds like it is about to take off.
3

I shut it down and cleaned some dust out of the vent adjacent to the fan, so we’ll see if that helps. I’ll also keep an eye on what programs seem to trigger it. Right now I’m just running Thunderbird and IE8, and things are cool and calm.

Thanks.

4

No prob, good luck Jerri. At work we use the Dell docking stations and that seems to help a lot. In order to dock it raises the rear of the laptop up about 3/4 of an inch, which makes it more comfortable to type on, and also gives it more airflow and cooling room.

5

Also possible: 1) Malware, 2) insane power settings that don’t let it drop the CPU below 100% (this happened to my mom once somehow).

6

Blast the living shit out of the air intakes/exhausts with a can of compressed air; if you really want to do it well and proper, do what Skipper suggested and dismantle the laptop enough to let you get at the ventilation bits from the inside.

7

All of my Dell laptops have required dis-assembly to the point I could pull dust out of the area around the fans. Just trying to get it out via the vents, without taking them apart, never really worked. Dell’s designs seem to pull a lot of dust into the system, even in a home utilizing air cleaners in each room.

On my early Dells this was simple and the impact on the running temps of the notebook were pretty amazing. On my M1710 (new a couple of years ago) it requires actually removing the display assembly, the keyboard assembly, and more. But every time, even with regular cleaning of the vents, I find big balls of dust inside.

8

Those cheap dell laptops are notorious for overheating. You’ve probably been using it underclocked for years too. Call support and bitch.

9

I’m assuming you’d want to do the living-shit blasting from the inside, right?

I should make clear that my cleaning involved taking the cover off the back, removing the shield over the fan and cleaning them from the inside, but I could only get what was on the surface.

One problem I have is that my power settings don’t allow the thing to sleep or the monitor to shut off, because the damned thing won’t wake up again. I’m sure that’s not good for it. I’m probably driving it to an early grave.

10

Laptops don’t have a long lifetime anyway, Jerry. I’ve seen time and time again a -lot- of them dying before lease renewal for us which is 36 months. Add a lot of travel use or heavy workload on the laptop and it increases the odds of that even more.

Always remember rule 1. *

  • Back up your data.
11

You can confirm that a normal app is using 100% CPU (causing it to heat up) by running Task Manager. Go to the Process tab, and click on CPU column header twice to have it show the highest CPU task first. For a mostly idle system, the Idle process should be #1 with about 90% CPU. If this is not the case, you now have the name of the app to do some research. You can try killing it there, too, but save your work first!

The not-waking-up-from-sleep problem is very likely a display driver problem, but I wouldn’t bother solving it for a 3 year old laptop. (To solve it, uninstall your current display driver, reboot to use the generic VGA and install whatever officially supported driver from Dell for your model. Back up everything first!)

12

The E6500 is basically a piece of garbage. Seriously, contact support.

13

It’s funny to read what you guys are saying about this model, because overall it’s the best Dell laptop I’ve ever had, probably because I bought it from the business side instead of the home side after having used and loved the one I have for work.

Compared to those cheap pieces of crap from the home side, this one’s been golden and very reliable until now.

14

Don’t feel bad, I’ve used the hell out of my 6400. If you’ve actually cleaned around the fans you have extended the life of the thing more than the vast majority of users. My only wish is that I had SSD on my work laptop. Next time …