Laptop is shutting down during the game

It is believed that laptops are designed exclusively for working purposes. The fact is – many people are buying them to keep at home as a regular multi-functional computer. Laptops are used to watch movies, surf through the Internet, work with office applications and do many other things, which includes playing computer games. A quite common problem that almost any laptop user may face from time to time – is the spontaneous shutdown during the game session. In this article we will try to explain why laptop turns off during the game, and how to avoid such inconvenience.

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Table of contents:
1. Why laptop shuts down during the game session
2. What should i do if my laptop is shutting down during the game

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Why laptop shuts down during the game session

Relatively small size is the biggest difference between the laptop and the standard regular computer. One of the most difficult tasks laptop manufacturers have to face while designing this or another model is the cooling issue. It is not so easy to place a big amount of fans in the small laptop casing. Also the flow of hot air has to exit quickly for the computer parts to be cooled down successfully.

While running productive games and applications your laptop will need to source some additional power for cooling. This process is usually accompanied by a specific noise, as well as by the accelerated flow of the hot air stream that is exiting from the holes designed for this purpose especially.  In case even the emergency cooling measures do not help to reduce the temperature of the main components down to the working one, the overheating protection is triggering itself and your laptop turns off during the game.

Usually before any computer shuts down due to overheating, it’s user may notice that the system performance has decreased. In the game, this can lead to a drop in frame rate, appearance of some artifacts and other problems. This is due to the fact that your computer is trying to cool it’s processor by skipping cycles. And in case this does not work, computer will proceed to the emergency shutdown mode.

There are some special applications that can help you to make sure that your laptop shuts down during the game exactly because of overheating. The amount of this applications is quite large, very often inbuilt programs like AMD or Nvidia are able to measure the temperature of a processor or a video cart (as this exactly parts are getting overheated first).

If your computer does not have any special applications to check the temperature of it’s elements, you can use the free Open Hardware Monitor program. Just simply download this application from the official developer’s website and run it to control the temperature of the system components, as well as the coolers rotation speed. Afters this you may start the game which previously was making your laptop to shut down. Play this game for few minutes and see to which point the heating parameters have changed.

What should i do if my laptop is shutting down during the game

If you detected that you computer is shutting down because of overheating if given some serious work to do, you definitely need to take care of this problem. In most cases it is enough to follow this three simple steps:

1. Clean your computer from dust and other sweepings. As we already mentioned above, laptop cooling is a very complex procedure and it become even more difficult if the device is full of dust. You can easily clean your laptop by yourself or – if you are not so confident – just take it to any reputable service center;
2. Change the thermal grease. While you are cleaning your laptop it is good to change the thermal grease on the processor. Professionals recommend to change thermal grease every 6-12 months, but still most users ignore this advice. Remember: when your laptop is working (and especially if it is overheated often) thermal grease will dry out and loose it’s properties;
3. Keep your computer on a cooling pad. Very often some of the air vents on a laptop are situated on it’s bottom. Because of this the air flow is hitting the surface where the laptop is standing and can not exit properly, which leads to a significant overheating. if you will put your laptop on a cooling pad this problem will be solved. Best option is to buy a cooling pad that has several fens installed so you can start them for additional cooling if there is a need for it.

It is worth noting that shutting down in the emergency mode because of overheating is very dangerous for your laptop. Later on this may lead to the system files failure or to even more serious trouble like a hard disk malfunction.