Toshiba 17" Laptop Overheating

[nasttcar]

My son is an Arch. Student and has a 17" Toshiba 3.0ghz with 2mb RAM. He does work with VIZ, 3DMax, Photoshop, and Autocad. Very often his laptop overheats and shuts off if much intensive work is going on. He has to raise his laptop and place ice packs under it to keep it running. He routinely blows the computer out. It is mostly used in a fairly clean environment with no pets, minimal carpet.

We have tried the fans that you put under the unit, but they do little good.

Any suggestions or is this a typical problem with these larger laptops.

 

[raptorrage]

laptops are known to be great at overheating but alot of this is due to certain factors for instance is the laptop loading with alot of software at startup killing a few of the startup apps it might be as simple as that , such as anything named "norton"
goto run >> type msconfig >> startup > and uncheck all of the unnessary programs from the startup list

alot of laptops come preloaded with alot of completely useless software such as 30 day trails type of stuff remove any and all you find

familiar your self with task manager get to know which services/apps are essential and the ones that aren't eliminate the ones that aren't This will also do wonders for your ram/ and battery life killing unneeded apps like this could be the cause of your overheating issues

check windows xp for services that are running that you really don't need you'd be surprised at how many there are that aren't really needed

after all of that and your still overheating Format might be the best choice
an added fan underneath the laptop should provide plenty of cool air to assist the cpu in cooling it sounds
could just be the cpu itself is just one of those chips that overheats no matter what you try to do to cool it down
sounds like a prescott aka HOTSCOTT even then it takes some doing to get the cpu hot enough to reach the thermal shutoff temperature