Laptop Fan runs non-stop!

Hello all

I have a 10 month old HP laptop with Intel Centrino 740 , 1GB ram that has begun to overheat very quickly when occassionally playing games and doing simply things like web surfing. The laptop is used for all things other than playing games.
If I play a game for about 5 minutes or websurf rapidly the cooling fan will cut in and will not stop for about 10 minutes after i stop using the laptop.And in extreme moments when the laptop is very hot it will just shut down without any warning. Yesterday the laptop shut down on me 3 times when i played a game for about 5 minutes.Also, web surfing within Firefox's mutiple tabs can sometimes cause the fan to run non stop for many minutes.

I would be grateful if anyone has any advice/opinions/comments about this problem.

Thank you

Laptops are not designed for long time usage by the way.

Mine overheats quite quickly too but even more so since I had troubles with the fan about a week ago.
Are you sure your cooling fan is connected properly, or if you have one, or, if it works.

Older laptops have more overheating problems than newer ones. What I do with such machines is place them onto something that lets air flow under the machine, e.g. two rulers or pencils.

A similar thing is true for battery life; older batteries could not feed a laptop for a very long time, and as the battery ages, it gets even shorter. New laptops have better batteries that can feed the computer for several hours. These laptops are also designed to use less power from the battery. Operating systems and application programs can also help to extend battery usage time; I hear that Windows 7 (the next Windows version after Vista) will help running batteries longer by more than 10%.

I know little or nothing about laptops, is it possible to clean out any dust that may be clogging the intake ports or outlets?