Notebook Overheating?

[donnagual]

I used to be able to play Oblivion, HL2 etc with great framerates on my notebook. It has a 7800GTX graphics card, a gig of ram and a Pentium M 2Ghz cpu.

Today when I went to play my framerates where great at first, but slowly get worse over time until they drop so bad the games are unplayable.

I have made no hardware or driver updates, so the only potential cause I can think of is that the system is overheating (and forcing my mobo to underclock my CPU). Unless someone can think of another cause?

How do I go about cleaning a notebook? Should I just open it up and blow out the dust? Never opened a notebook before, so forgive me if this is a stupid question.

According to speedfan, it is idling at 50c and goes up to about 56c while gaming.

Thanks in advance!

 

[grafton]

what kind of laptop do you have? specs plz

 

[donnagual]

It has a 7800GTX graphics card, a gig of ram and a Pentium M 2Ghz cpu.
http://www.clevo.com.tw/products/M570A.asp

 

[donnagual]

Hmmm. The problem may be worse than originally thought.

This morning I had a hard time booting up the laptop. Kept getting a windows/system file not found. Had to reboot a few times before I could get into windows.

I suppose I'll run a windows repair on it and hope it fixes it up.... [crosses fingers]

 

[rivalneighbour]

Couple of sites that have guides on how to clean a notebook

Clean a laptop heatsink: At a glance
http://www.short-media.com/review.php?r=258

*CNET insider secrets clean up your laptop (wait for the video to load)
http://reviews.cnet.com/Clean_up_your_laptop/4660-10165_7-6648292.html

My son has a Toshiba Satellite P25-S670 (or 607, cant remember) His notebook acted the same way. after awhile it would shut down then eventually the monitor remained black or wouldnt come on. probably the backlight or inverter on his notebook went bad. we looked on the internet on how to clean it from dust but it was already too late. he never got it fixed (only $100 bucks for the part) i just ended up giving him my pentium D 930 pc.