Alienware Area-51m With Heat Problems

I've had my laptop since October of 2004 and I've had some heat related crashes ever since the beginning, but the crashes were few and far between, never bothered me too much and a cooling pad seemed to take care of the problem. Unfortunatelty, this summer I am living in a rather hot room and the crashes came back with a vengence, 2, 3 or more times a day, depending on what I am doing.

I have done a lot of reserach and tried pretty much everything from reinstalling to replacing the thermal paste on the cpu. Nothing helped, but I noticed that neither gpu or cpu intensiv tasks seemed to influence the crashes, rather anything using up a lot of Ram seem to accelerate the crashes. (I do a lot of ram-intensive stuff as graphic design student) So I decided to remove the keyboard (using a USB keyboard instead) and RAM cover to see if it made any difference... and yes it did. i did not completely resolve the crashes but a small hand-fan aimed at the ram chips is taking care of it for now and I haven't had a crash since. Of course this is not a good solution: the hand fan is cooling the ram chips instead of myself, my desktop pc doesn't have a keyboard and I can't take the laptop anywhere.

Does anybody have any idea on how I can possibly cool the ram chips (I got 2 Apacer 512 MB blocks) without unmounting the keyboard?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

I think you should contact your support they will definitely know what to do. If you already did this try putting another fan that's what I did with my desktop PC, but I don't think this is possible for laptops. I have a toshiba laptop that has 2 fans, it rarely crash. I think you should sell yo ur laptop And buy one with a double fan. Hope you luck on cooling your LaP.

You are right there Hadi. One funny thing about laptops is that you cant add any other fans for extra cooling. My Desktop was once overheating cos there was not enough air ventilation within the case. The poblem then was that the computer was carrying so many drives that the internal cooling fans which came with the case couldnt withstand the heeting in there. There was 3 HDDs (80GB x2 + 40GB All Seagate Barracudas) plus one DVD-RW drive and 2 CD-RW drives. And apart from that, I am using an nVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 128MB w/TV out. Its GPU heats up real badly during game play and then, I also clocked my 2.40 GHz MMX Processor to 3.20 GHz. All these were too much for the fans.

I solved my problem by first getting a small cooling fan for the Graphics card's GPU. That settled itsd overheating. Then I changed the case altogether another type which has more internal fans and a very good ventilation system.

That solved my problem and since then, I havent ever excperienced the overheating again.

Like Hadi said, I would say that you should try and sell your laptop and buy another one with more ventilation and moe cooling fans too.

This post has been edited by odomike: Jun 15 2006, 11:12 PM

Alienware Area 51m Overheating Problem Solved!!
Alienware Area-51m With Heat Problems

I have an Alienware Area 51m 17x and was bothered with Overheating and recently removed the the CD/RW Liteon Junk took it out completely and use an external runs like new again wish I would Have done that 4 years ago!!

-reply by Darren Olson