Diagnose and Fixing an Overheating Laptop (Lighten the Load)

Step Two: Lighten the Load

  If you suspect your computer’s heat is related processing load rather than hardware, you can try some tricks to better manage those processes. Fire up the Windows Task Manager to see what’s using your CPU so intensively. It might help to limit what apps start automatically with Windows and even change the order of the startup processes that are necessary. The staggered loading of software will help balance your processor’s load.
You can also install and run Process Explorer to see the files that each process has open and its associated CPU usage over time. This can help you decide what to get rid of and what to spare. We’re also big fans of CCleaner, which allows you to clean history and cache files as well as manage your startup applications quickly and easily. You can free up some much needed space that way and get a little more efficiency out of your OS.
If you want to keep an eye on the temperature of your laptop, you can use an application like Speccy or any number of others to keep an eye on what’s going on.
If you’re using Linux instead, you might want to consider a more spartan distro. I’ve personally had a lot of success with Crunchbang. A clean install leaves me with Openbox as a window manager, a nice dock, and some nice desktop effects, along with only 80MB of RAM usage. It’s based on Debian, so there’s a good amount of compatibility with software. If you run Arch, you might want to try ArchBang
instead, which is the same thing but built on Arch instead of Debian.