💬 My laptop hits 90 degrees every May, here's what I tried

Every year around May my laptop starts sounding like a small helicopter. Hyderabad summers are not kind to it. Last year it shut itself down in the middle of a video call. Right when my manager started talking. I went through everything I could find online, so here's what moved the numbers for me. I watched the temperature in a free monitoring app and wrote down what changed. The free fixes came first. I stopped using it on my bed, because pillows and blankets cover the vents. Putting it on a hard table, with a small stand under the back edge, dropped it by 5 or 6 degrees. I also opened Task Manager with Ctrl, Shift and Escape and found 3 background apps eating CPU for nothing. Closing them helped more than I expected. One was an updater I'd forgotten about. Next was dust. My laptop is 3 years old and I had never opened it. I took it to a repair shop near my house and he cleaned the fan and heatsink in 20 minutes. He showed me the dust, a grey felt pad, and I was embarrassed. It cost me very little. The temperature under load dropped by almost 10 degrees after that, which beat everything else. Then the cooling pad. Mine gave about 3 to 5 degrees under load. Don't expect miracles. If you buy one, pick a pad with 2 or more bigger fans, not a single small one. The cheapest ones were louder than my laptop and did less. I returned the first one. The room matters too. A fan pointed at the table did more than the pad did. So my order is free fixes, then dust cleaning, then a pad if you still need one. Before opening your laptop yourself, check if a warranty seal will break. What's worked for you during May and June? Anything free that I missed? Has anyone cleaned theirs without taking it to a repair shop?

My laptop is 5 years old and a cooling pad did almost nothing for it. Raising the back helped more. The dust cleaning is the part I'd double check. Did your repair shop replace the thermal paste too? When I got mine redone at a small shop near Charminar, that made a bigger difference than the dust. I'm not saying everyone needs it. But on an older laptop it's worth asking about.

Same story with my Dell last May. It throttled all afternoon, so I tried a Cosmic Byte pad for around 900 rupees. I also put a wooden block under the back edge. Together they dropped the temperature 8 to 10 degrees. Mine was full of dust too, and I cleaned it the same weekend. So I can't say what did more. Did you check the temperature after the cleaning alone, before the pad?