The RX For A Sick Laptop

You know your laptop is sick. The fan is always running, it burns your legs when you put it on your lap, or worst of all, it inexplicably shuts down causing you to loose the last half hour of work. Why does it have these life threatening symptoms? Like all good doctors, we don’t make definitive diagnoses over e-mail, but we bet it’s one of three things:

• The air intake vent is blocked
• A background application that you can’t see is sucking up power
• The internal cooling system is filthy and no longer works correctly

If you’re into home remedies, you can check for the first problem yourself. Find your air vent (I know that sounds basic, but I could tell you stories…) then see if it is blocked by anything (furniture, books, pillows, cats…) If not, check if the rubber feet have fallen off the bottom causing it to rest flat on your desk. Replacement feet are available at hardware stores. If neither of those is the issue, move on to #2 and #3 on the list.

It gets kind of geeky to find out if the problem is a background application… Close any active applications that you have running. Hit Ctrl, Alt and Del all at the same time and launch Windows Task Manager. Select the Performance tab and note the CPU usage graph on the top. If it is spending a lot of time above 50% you have some program that is hogging your processor.

The last potential problem has a “kids don’t try this at home” solution. After 2-3 years all the crumbs from your lunch, shavings from erasers, (cat hair), and tiny spills of coffee that you were sure didn’t hurt anything have taken their toll. The guts of your computer are “gunked up” (to use a technical term.) Your laptop needs a thorough internal cleaning (sort of a laptop colonic if you will) to get it working correctly again. While prying open the machine and vacuuming it out with the Dyson may be very tempting, don’t do it. This really is a job for a professional. The good news is that it is a short job. And we promise, it won’t hurt.

Wishing you good laptop health and reminding you that the IT doctor is always in,

Darrell Gray
Networkistics, Inc.
IT consulting and support services
925.249.9980
www.networkistics.com