Laptop help please!

[paulas6]

I have a few questions? I have an hp cq61 411-wm. On Sunday my son left the laptop on for about 4 hours while he was doing something else. When he went back to boot and turn it off, the computer would not come out of sleep mode. After looking into it I got the computer to turn back on by doing the hard reset and waiting about an hour with it being on and then rebooting. I thought it fixed it but it seems that every time the laptop is turned off it won't reboot correctly. Every time you have to let it sit for about 30 minutes and then reboot and it will come up. Once it does come up the laptop works great. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Paula

[Rik_]

It being an HP, is it overheating? (HP's are notorious for this)
When it is running, can you feel warm air exiting the vents when the fan is running? Is the fan running at full speed a majority of the time? Can you feel a heat buildup on the underside of it?
If you are getting any or all of those symptoms then the cooling system needs to be cleaned and refurbished. The only way to do this properly is to take the laptop apart and clean out the fan and heatsink. If you don't feel you are capable of doing this then you will have to take it to your local repair shop.
I work in a local repair shop and we get 20+ HP laptops a week with overheating issues and ours is only a small shop in a smallish town.

[rubberman]

What Rik said - HP's are notorious for overheating. Some of my colleagues at work have ones that keep shutting down unexpectedly. We changed the performance settings from "Performance" to "Balanced" and that made them much more stable. IE, they would only ramp the CPU up to full speed when needed, otherwise it would run at a lower speed, thus keeping the heat under control.

Fortunately, I have a Lenovo laptop, and they seem much more stable when running continuously at a high performance level.