Note: this might seem a little obvious, but it's amazing how often it is overlooked, so I thought I'd post it here!
Recently my Dell Inspiron 17R with an NVidia Geforce GT525m has been running extremely hot (~96 Celsius for the GPU). I've read everywhere that this is a common temperature for it to be running at, especially as I've overclocked the core clock by 180Hz (to the maximum allowed) and the memory by 90Hz. But after discovering a large amount of dust, I attempted to clean the fan and board from the outside (mainly by blowing very hard into the fan outlet, and using an air blower on the various grills - a colossal amount of dust was extracted). The average running temperature after this is now ~67 Celsius, a drop of nearly 30 degrees! This was completely unexpected given how common it is to see these cards running in the 90's, and this is a helpful performance / lifespan boost (performance because the card throttles back when it gets close to the thermal junction max temp).
So, if your laptop is running hot, before splashing out on a fancy cooler or underclocking your card, try cleaning the darn thing, especially the fan! Ideally take out the keyboard/HDD tray and give everything a dust off; it can make a huge difference. If you don't fancy taking it apart, try using a vaccuum, or blowing hard into the fan outlet (be careful not to spit into it).
Also worth checking the utilities that came with your laptop, you may have one of these:
[img]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/286964/dust.PNG[/img]
Part of the reason for dust buildup is the low fan speed during normal use, in my case this utility runs through a series of varying fan speeds to dislodge dust.
Obviously not the best solution but it can't hurt.
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