...step away from the overheating laptop.
It's time to upgrade my laptop. It's practically an antique...almost ten years old. (That's 70 in dog years and 700 in tech years.) It isn't that it stalls out on me at inopportune times, although it does. In its salad days, it amazed me by being able to run three or four major apps at a time. Now when I try to run five, it freezes up. It just isn't keeping up with my needs any more.
I'd forgive it but for thing: IT'S TOO DAMNED HOT!
Instead of air conditioning, I have three fans in my office. In the summer, even they can't keep me at my desk for more than an hour at a time during the heat of the day. Fortunately, summertime is when I can set my own schedule. During the school year, I have to be up early to cross kids at the corner. I can't stay up to the wee hours when the temperature starts to fall.
If only summer ended with the summer holidays. You might say, I'm heat deactivated. But I have nothing on my laptop. It gets slow and temperamental in the heat, like a grumpy old man. If I try to keep working, it stops short, reminding me of my father in his walker-wielding phase. (My father loved that walker. He always had somewhere to sit down when he got tired.)
Even if it doesn't stall, freeze or completely shut down, eventually my laptop lets me know it's had enough by getting too hot to handle. For the last couple of lovely cool days, that's taken a while. In the dog days of summer, it hardly took any time before I couldn't type because the laptop was burning my wrists. No amount of fans blowing cooled that burn.
Of course, maybe I should wait until spring to replace my laptop. Soon we'll be complaining about the cold and I'll have a built-in hand warmer.