Our clients son was using his laptop on his bed. A laptops fan is designed to suck air in to keep the hard drive cool, so using the laptop on a soft surface can prevent air flow and also allow the fan to suck dust from the bed up into the cooling system. After a while the laptop starts clog up and overheat, which causes frequent shut downs and eventually damage to the internal components.

Dave had to pull the entire laptop apart to remove the dust and replace the arctic silver thermal paste.