Over heating

[Carina16]

My girlfriend and I both have a Compaq Presario CQ57. About two weeks ago, mine started over heating, but only when I would play games I had downloaded on the computer. I could surf the web and do anything with no problems. Three days ago, my girlfriends computer started over heating when playing anything that went full screen, ie - downloaded games and Facebook games.

I tried taking the back off to clean the fans but for the life of me I can't figure out how to get to the fans.

[Daskinor]

for these laptops you need to take them mostly apart and clean off the internal heat sync using compressed air. Do not attempt to vacuum! This can be fairly tricky to do since this model uses a more unique keyboard design. Allot of laptops you can just remove the keyboard to get to the heat sync. This one you need to completely dissemble.

Unless you have worked on a laptop before I would ship it off to a professorial. Especially if you smoke around the computer as it will need to be cleaned with a solvent as well.

[suburbandecay]

Here's the manual for disassembling it: http://bizsupport2.austin.hp.com/bc/.../c02786367.pdf

However, you might want to try taking a can of dust off and aiming it into the air intake to see if you can blow some crud out of the machine.

[PepperElf]

you also might want to just ask your local tech store how much it would cost to clean it.