Dell Inspiron 7538 Overheating and Shutting down

[Chessmaster9922]

My computer keeps overheating and then shuts down byitself. So, I opened up the laptop and cleaned out the fan using compressed air. Yet, my laptop still overheats and the fan is constantly running at full speed. My laptop is a Dell Inspiron 13 7000 series 2 in 1. I have also ran antivirus scan, which didnt find anything.

 

 

[David H. Lipman]

Dell Inspiron 7538 overheating and then shutting down  

Use the compressed air and blow out the the dust from the CPU heat sink fins and from all air in-take ports.  The fan is only a part of the equation.

Please run Dell Diagnostics.

[exile360]

If you have the know-how, it could also make a huge difference to change the thermal paste being used to cool the CPU.  In my laptop I'm running a desktop CPU i7-7700K overclocked to 4.5GHz and an NVIDIA GTX 1060 6GB graphics card and I never have heat issues, even when running CPU/GPU intensive applications like modern 3D games.  I had an almost identical laptop with an older i7-4910MQ mobile CPU and an NVIDIA GTX 970M that I couldn't keep cool even at stock speeds.  In my new system the temps never get hot enough for me to have any concerns (around 93C for the CPU absolute max when running stress tests and benchmarks, though most of the times it's in the 50's~70's under normal intensive loads and in the 30's~50's at idle).

The new system is using Grizzly Kryonaut thermal paste and this stuff is absolutely amazing (though you don't have to take my word for it; if you do a Google search about heat/overclocking/thermal paste you'll see plenty of others singing its praises because of how good it is and how well it works).

If you don't know how to change the thermal paste, then you should take it to a reputable tech shop where they can do it for you.  Either buy the thermal paste yourself or tell them specifically what kind you want them to use and they'll get it all set for you and you'll definitely improve your heat situation.

[Firefox]

I would do both things already suggested by @David H. Lipman and @exile360

As a matter of fact, I just finished repairing a laptop (this one a Toshiba) with the same issue.  In this case the fan was defective because it was making noise and you can tell it was not spinning at the right speed.  You can get the part numbers to the fans right off the fan on the laptop and order a replacement on Amazon if needed.