Cooling pads are hit or miss. They may lower the temps by 2-4 degrees or not at all. You need to get a decent one or the results may not be visible at all. Speaking from my own experience.
Changing thermal paste every now and then may also help. It requires some disassembling, though, so some people might get scared at the first sight
The problem I faced concerned more "demanding" games than Freelancer - eg. SWTOR or Heroes of the Storm. Yes, I'm not speaking about gaming laptops here :')
In the end I was merely surprised that such a simple solution may lower temps by such a large margin. Keep in mind that the very same resolution didn't drop temps until I switched to windowed mode
Is your laptop overheating? Try to understand the role of this device in first . 90% laptops, excluding high-end ones, are just computers for business designed to open windows (or mac), office, some photo/video/Sound/3D modelling/editing software, internet sites and minesweeper (regardless of their manufacturers propaganda) So learn how to use your device properly and try to do things only on proper devices and everything will be ok Buy some gaming oriented laptop if you wana play someshing on it without the need to attach some useless junk or doing some cheap tricks in cooling reasons
Anyway all parts of a whole new PC, capable to run games like Dota, lol, Hots, war/starcraft and any other isometrics at any avaliable for this games graphic (or any other) level until the 30 century without any problems, will cost you not more then 300-400$ if you know how to use Amazon and if you have some skills to assemble PC yourself (or a friend who knows how to do it)
Cooling pads are evil, coz they brake the air flow directions inside the laptop. and too high amount of "cooling" air leads to inapropriate amount of dust, hair, and other crap, stucking in the places inside your laptop where it never had a chance to be without a help of that junk named "cooling pad". Try to imagine what is the consequence of all this "cooling"? eh? Yes - overheating
About the lower temperature in windowed mode, it sounds like windowed mode simply lowers your FPS due to either CPU or GPU (or other) reasons, and the lower FPS lowers the temperature of the other (CPU or GPU) reason.
(12-12-2019, 12:56 AM)Karlotta Wrote: Also get dust out of your ventilation.
About the lower temperature in windowed mode, it sounds like windowed mode simply lowers your FPS due to either CPU or GPU (or other) reasons, and the lower FPS lowers the temperature of the other (CPU or GPU) reason.
windowed mode just drops down game screen resolution and of course it leads to less GPU load = less temperature
If the resolution is the same in full and windowed, the only thing additional in full would be a "scale up" (which I'd expect to be a pretty simple and standard algorithm handled by a dedicated chip considering hte commonality), not more 3D calculations, shadows, lighting , anti-aliasing, XxY-linerea filtering. I'd expect that not to be much more GPU processing compared to the other, but could be mistaken. (in other words, running FL with 180 FPS instead of 60 is more likely to take more calculations than simply replicating pre-existant pixels by a factor of 3)