Why is my laptop getting overheated when i watch a video?

Some laptops have a system where, when the laptop isn’t using much power, there is no reason to have the fans on. Because having the fans on also use power. But when you start to do some heavy stuff, like watch movies or play games, the fans kick on to prevent overheating. So don’t worry if the fans kick on & off every now & then, it’s very normal. To check for overheating, just feel across the top & bottom to see if there is some unusual high heat emitting from it. A high heat would be a temperature at which you can’t keep your hand on the surface for too long before feeling like it is going to burn you. There are some programs out there that will let you manually control the fan speed, but use those at your own risk.

What OS are you using?

Too many processes, cool off your computer. Get a cooling mat or stick a blue ice pack under it.

When I’m overworking my CPU, my laptop gets very hot right in the area where the CPU is located. Maybe it’s the same with yours. Get a good cooling pad for it. Cheap ones break or wear out fast. Good ones tend to last longer.

So much dust builds up on the fan that cools your laptop because of some static kind of property. If you don’t blow it out once in a while it will start to overheat. I forgot mine for a while and it actually got so over-heated it shut down. After i blew the dust out with “canned air” the fan went back to cooling things down as normal. i guess enough heat gets trapped by the dust to prevent your fan from regulating the temperature as it should.

Watching videos generally puts more of a load on your CPU and graphics chip than something like surfing the internet. That means more power draw and thus more heat generated.

It probably hasn’t actually overheated, but it has to kick up the fan speed to keep it from overheating, and faster fans are louder fans.

It could be worse though. My old desktop used to be fairly loud when cold and a few minutes of gaming would kick the fans up to full speed, making it sound like an F/A-18 once the CPU got to 146F. As for the video card, that thing rarely ran less than 145F at idle and often exceeded 160F when gaming. By comparison, the laptops I’ve had rarely go over 120F, and the fans are quiet (though still audible) at the normal idle temp of 110F.

Is it a steamy video?