Laptop temperature

[LD]

My laptop works pretty well on the whole, but I want to make sure I get a long life out of it. I've noticed the exhaust gets pretty hot relatively soon, and I plan on getting an aluminum cooler stand, but not yet. Until then, what's the acceptable limits for a laptop before I should worry? What's a good temp monitoring program?

I run this.

I thought about opening it up and using compressed air, but I'm worried about messing it up somehow. Plus, the only tools that might fit the screws to do it might or might not be magnetized, so I couldn't even if I wanted to.

[Krandor]

Everest for monitoring your temps, if you want to shell out a few bucks, get ultimate edition. You can put a little sidebar on the corner of your screen to show temps with it as well, for easy monitoring. It can also output to Logitech LCD screens you might have from some of their keyboards (or on laptops with little LCD screens next to the keyboard, which my large laptop has).

As for temps, it varies from computer to computer. I try to keep my big laptop under around 75c on the GPU (at around 85~c it will shut down the GPU to prevent damage), the CPU is much better cooled and I never worry about it's temps. My M11x can't get higher then 65c on the GPU if I even tried. If you want to get an idea on what your computer can handle, get Furmark and run it for awhile.

Really though, you should get a laptop cooler as soon as you can, outside of the M11x, which is very well cooled (and I've tested my laptop coolers and they don't even do anything for it due to the location of the fan), I always used a cooler with my laptops. It's just a generally good investment to always make sure your computer runs solid. I would definitely suggest something from Zalman, their coolers are a little more expensive but they're the cream of the crop.

[Pikarya]

Can make your own easily if you have a dremel and some spare 80-120mm fans laying around with some acrylic.

[LD]

I had initially considered this Zalman, but I've been leaning towards this NZXT because of the larger size and collapsibility.

In both cases, I'm worried about the direction of the air flow. I know it's a bad idea to to have a cooler suck air out of the bottom when the normal exhaust is blowing the other way. I've never had one of these before, do they (for lack of a better term) generally blow or suck?

[Krandor]

Every laptop cooler I've ever used (which is alot, I've primarily used only laptops for about 7 or 8 years now) blows air at the laptop.

[LD]

Thanks a lot for the info, this all helped a lot.