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laps.
Research finding released recently indicates that men who spend long periods with laptops on their laps are at risk of having their sperm count reduced.
I will not turn this tech column into a medical one, but after learning the devastating effects of overheating laptop on humans but also on the gadgets themselves, I was compelled to share this with you. 
Despite my experience with laptops I feel a little old school about desktops and still believe we cannot totally do away without them.
Definitely not because of their appearance but it is a fact that desktops have an edge over laptops when it comes to air circulation.
Besides, I have never imagined laptops replacing desktops inasmuch as tablets won’t replace laptops.
There is a place for each one of them, which is just irreplaceable. Laptops have greatly improved with technology, the amount of processors was multiplied, the hardware was put into slimmer cases, integrated into smaller microchips and better video graphics cards enabled bigger screens with higher resolutions.
These advancements however, come at an obvious cost, heat! When your laptop continuously restarts with the fan coming on more often than you remember and if it becomes louder then definitely your laptop will be overheating.
Other signs to look out for include very hot air being blown out, your cooling fan always running at maximum speed and literally getting your thighs burnt.
Computer viruses, like the devil, have always been blamed for all ills and, yes, technically they can cause computer-overheating problems.
We shall once again not spare them here too. I will not delve much in viruses as I have explored them already.
To quickly check if your overheating is virus driven issue or not you need to observe the time it takes between restart intervals. This should be almost con-stant.
The only obvious difference with non-virus related overheating issues is probably the time effect.
An overheating laptop will take time before it overheats the first time even when you immediately force it to start up thereafter it will not take much time to restart again.
However, is it takes time to restart before it cools down completely, then you know definitely you have a cooling problem.
Hardware overheating problems are all caused by one common issue — poor cooling system.
Laptops generate so much heat that only a perfectly working cooling system keeps them running flawlessly.
A computer processor can become red hot when its working, but fortunately it has a heat sink and cooling fans to keep it going.
For all computer processors, there is a mini temperature sensor on top of the chip itself that constantly monitors its temperature.
Moreover, the fail-safe software may trigger a sudden shutdown to prevent hardware damage.
Just in between the processor and the heat, there is a thermal grease or compound.
This grease conducts heat but not electricity. It passes the heat over to a copper conductor, which then carries the heat outside the processor area via the tubing.
With the cooling fans running on the processor, hot air is subsequently pushed out of the CPU.
A system similar to a car exhaust cooling system is applied to our laptops. Some computer BIOS setups can be used to control heat problems, these have the capacity to quickly shut down the computer when it overheats without communicating with the operating system.
At times they even load and protect your computer before the operating system is operational, right after booting up.
Some laptops have more than two fans, these all aid the cooling system, the main fan is located right underneath the laptop and this draws cool air from outside into the laptop and pushes it up to the computing system.
This fan is the most crucial since it is the one taking in the cool air to the system.
The other fan works from the top part of the processor, it only pushes out hot air from the system and this is the hot air we often complain about which is mainly blown from the laptops sides and not underneath.
The hot air caused by overheating like I stated in my previous article can also directly destroy the chemical composition inside your laptop battery.
Laptops have the potential to generate so much heat that we tend to ignore at times yet its effects might be long term and slowly works on degrading our computers before we start to complain about the obvious unbearable heat.
There are many mistakes we make every day that are slowly killing out our laptops, which we could have avoided.
Overheating problems are caused by many factors, which we will later look into in our quest to help our computers to stay in shape.

The writer is a computing specialist at http://tech.co.zw, Twitter @TechnoMagZim  [email protected] [email protected]