I have an Acer Aspire 4920G that I’ve had for a couple of years, running Windows/Ubuntu.
I have temperature monitors set up so i can see that with time my CPU temps go as high as 85C, sometimes even spiking to 90C. On startup, the temps are around 65C-75C.
How bad is this, and anything I can do to avoid it/reduce the temp? I’ve already tried to open up the laptop to clean away any dust, but unfortunately some of the screws are really hard to remove. I don’t want to take it to a shop before trying stuff out myself as I’m no longer under warranty.
40C-70C is the normal range.
The easiest solution is to buy a laptop fan/cooling station. They are the size of a laptop, and have 1 or 2 fans. I am responding to your question on a Dell 17” laptop, which is sitting on a Belkin laptop fan, which is sitting on my lap.
As Tom stated, normal range would be be 40-70C.
For the electronics, the lifespan will shorten a little (but this computer will be retired before you will notice that).
However, the harddrive does not like this kind of heat. But if you make daily backups to another place there is not much to worry about.
So at the end of the day, don’t trust this computer to work tomorrow (even thou it probably will).
To fix this kind of problem, you need to clean everthing, probably change some fans, add new cooling paste on the cpu etc etc. I’m not not sure it is worth the job, since the odds of putting a laptop back together could be better.
/good luck