It’s that time of year again in London where school’s out and the temperatures are soaring. But although we’re partial to a sunny day, it’s key to remember that the UK has seen some of the highest continuous temperatures in recent years. This can be catastrophic for your business devices, so it is always important to know how to keep your laptop safe from overheating.
Long term impacts of laptop overheating
While many businesses are aware of the immediate dangers of laptops overheating – such as fires or burns – the lesser-known long term impacts can be just as troubling. High summer temperatures can slowly damage your devices, resulting in deteriorated performance, data corruption, or even sudden shutdown. So, by ensuring safe device use in hot weather, you’re not only preventing an accident but protecting its health.
You may be thinking, “these long-term issues won’t happen to me” or “they won’t affect my business”, and you would be wrong. There are a few key issues your business may experience because of continued device exposure to high temperatures:
Lost productivity
The first common implication of your laptop overheating includes intermittent device restarts. When your laptop has a lot of applications open and running, you may notice it gets hotter. So, to combat overheating, your system may often restart to prevent further heat buildup.
If your business has ever experienced significant downtime from internet connectivity issues or updates this affects you similarly. Your tasks will be delayed, deadlines pushed back, and valuable time wasted, waiting for device to reboot. Alongside general decreased performance, inevitably all the disruptions mean your productivity will fall.
Data loss
Laptop overheating can cause significant problems for the functionality of your internal components. You may experience system crashes, leading to unsaved files and unsalvageable work. Recovery from lost files can be difficult and cause further implications for critical business operations.
Furthermore, if your business stores its data locally or on device hard drives, data corruption can occur. This destroys the integrity of important documents and even entire folders, which can be disastrous without data backup.
Increased costs
Inevitably, if you or your employees experience sudden shutdown of your work laptops, this is an immediate expense required. A sudden replacement may be necessary to ensure your employees can undertake daily tasks. If not, you could suffer longer downtime and serious loss of productivity.
However, if your laptop overheating leads to slower deterioration issues this may not prove any cheaper. Frequent repairs and maintenance on your business laptops can prove even more costly and drain your IT budget.
Tips to prevent your laptop overheating in hot weather
Below we uncover some essential tips for taking care of your laptop and preventing overheating in hot weather:
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Keep in mind the “safe range” for temperatures
Most laptops are fine in temperatures ranging between 10°c to 35°c. Anything warmer than this can cause problems. In fact, your laptop will often let you know it’s overheating and automatically warn you or shut down to prevent damage.
However, it’s important to note that laptop batteries are not known for being heat friendly. Even a few exposures to high temperatures impact battery life. Concerningly, long term heat exposure can harm internal components, making your delicate hard drive expand. This can sometimes lead to permanent damage and hard drive failure.
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Give your laptop a chance to adjust to new temperatures
If you’re moving between differing temperature environments, you’ll want to let your laptop adjust to changes. For example, if you’re moving from working in the sun outside to air conditioned indoors, shut down your laptop.
It’s important to let your device adjust to the new temperature before starting it up again as it requires a safe transition to function. This will help reduce the risk of condensation building up inside your machine and damaging internal components. Moisture can short-circuit your device, leading to permanent damage and shutdown.
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Know how to keep your laptop safe in a hot car
Treat your laptop like a pet and don’t ever leave it in a warm car to overheat. Even leaving your laptop in the trunk can cause overheating and subsequent damage. On a warm day, your car acts as a greenhouse, trapping heat inside and scorching seats. So, why wouldn’t it do the same to your laptop?
These high temperatures in your car will almost always reach outside the laptop safe range. So, if you must leave your laptop in a car, make sure it’s been turned off completely.
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Stay out of direct sun exposure, if you can
Heat usually comes with lots of direct sunlight. We’ve all heard the urban legends about laptop screens getting damaged from sun exposure, but there isn’t any strong evidence to support it. Either way, it’s better to be safe than sorry.
But if you do choose to work in direct sunlight, do it in moderation. Also, make it easy on your eyes. Go for a laptop hood or attach an anti-glare screen cover.
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Save your files to your data store
Data backup should already be a part of your cybersecurity strategy and disaster recovery plan, but as a reminder, ensure you have a robust backup system in place.
As a business reliant on technology to run your operations, you should be saving copies of all your key files away from your laptop’s hard drive. Choose a cloud storage solution or utilise a physical server or NAS device for data backup.
Just to reiterate, prolonged heat exposure can do permanent damage to your hard drive. Therefore, your critical business data should not be saved on your machine.
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Use a heat-dissipating laptop stand
You know how much your laptop can overheat from sitting in your lap, so be careful of where you set it outdoors. At the very least, you will want to consider using a laptop pad or stand to prevent significant overheating. But for A+ effort, grab a self-cooling stand for the safest use outside.
Generally, your computer will manage heat without any issues when running powerful applications. This means that your laptop’s fans will need to rotate quicker when performing complicated tasks like maintenance, copying files, streaming data, and sharing files.
To deal with it, there are several ways to silence noisy fans. However, if your fan’s loud noise becomes infuriatingly frequent, this could indicate an underlying problem.
Reach out for further support on safe laptop use
If you have any other queries regarding safe business device practices, or would like to find out about managed IT support services in London, you can always contact us at totality services. Reach out to one of our friendly experts today for a free assessment of your device health!