Bitcoin Forum

Hey all. First of all, I'm a newbie to mining and like most newbies I jumped head first and started mining from my laptop without reading about the possible consequences. I have a Lenovo y510p, one year old. Four days ago I left it mining for 6 hours straight while I was away and when I got back everything was fine. I noticed it was generating a lot of heat and got a little worried but as soon as I stopped the mining everything was fine. The next few days the laptop worked normally. I thought it was a bit slower at times but I thought I'm just being paranoid. Either way I decided not to mine anymore. Today, 4days after mining I woke up and turned on the laptop and after a few minutes of running a video in vlc player, everything froze. Video was playing but I couldn't open google chrome or anything else. I restarted and it wouldn't start up. Windows kept diagnosing the problem and it finally said that I need to do a system restore. I haven't done it yet because I wanted to hear some opinions before losing stuff on my hard drive. If it is indeed because of mining, what exacy my got fried? Which part will I need to replace? And wouldn't it have been fried right away? Is it possible that its not that bad? I can take it back to the store as its still in warranty but its in a different city so I need to make sure I tried everything beforehand. Thanks and sorry for typos, writing from my phone.

I'm not sure whether it's due to mining with your laptop coz it worked good for 4 days. You told it's a one year old laptop. Modern laptops are capable to turn itself off if the heat is about to damage the physical components. You don't have to worry about content loss if you've to do a system restore or even if you're about to install fresh OS, you can possibly retain the contents in the hard drive including the contents of C drive.

Note: I said "retain" (You can install new OS without deleting any files), not "recover" (recovering deleted files).

the fan ca still be damage because before the system take everything off and shutdown the laptop, the fan would spin at above the right speed thus ruining it, even if it is for a short amount of timing


bears in mind that you need to clean your laptop from the dust from time to time, otherwise the fan might nor work well

CPU mining is obsolete for long. It is high time people understand it and move over to cloud mining rather than wasting their resource...

The OP might have been mining a CPU alt. At least I sure hope he was otherwise that's a chunk of electricity down the drain.

Mining is very intensive on all aspects of hardware and laptops especially aren't designed for continuous usage in the way a dedicated miner is. The processor runs hard and a lot more heat than usual is generated. Even if it doesn't shut itself down, mining makes it operate in a way it's not designed for.

I think if it is in warranty then the best option for you would be to take it to the service center, don't tell anything about mining, just tell them you were playing games and it got stuck.

Not sure but I am guessing you might have burned some Capacitors, ICs, chip of the board, I had a laptop that had the same issue and the capacitors were not fully burnt but they'd get heat up pretty quickly and then the laptop would shut down. And I had to get a new board.

PS: I should thank you because I was going to give mining a shot and downloaded CGminer and BFGminer last night but now after hearing this, I am not even gonna install them.

Well that's sucks. You should never use your laptop for mining purpose. Gain is always worse than your loss.

WARNING: CPU MINING MIGHT BURN YOUR ENTIRE HOUSE , YOUR LAPTOP CPU / BATTERY MIGHT GET OVERHEATED THEN BOOM.

I assume that CPU Mining is so pointless nowadays, Its very useless for now. Try investing a cloud mining service
NOTE: Not all cloud mining are working, Some of them are scams! Just be alert

or take a look here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1063180

Lol. A week ago or so I fried my Mac with CPU mining. Not the whole Mac, but the touchpad and a half of buttons stopped working. Writing with an on-screen keyboard right now. Don't mine with Macs and with laptops in general, looks like they are too vulnerable for these tasks.

Hmm, why would you mine bitcoin with a laptop in the first place? ??? I tried mine just for experimenting, and take note it is a 5-year old laptop. Ran it for 5 hours at full speed on 2 cores and the temps are at 60 degrees C so I stopped it. But I still mine different altcoins from time to time using this old machine and trying to avoid mining bitcoin as much as possible. Dude, CPU mining on bitcoin became obsolete 3 years ago. Why even bother wasting your machine for literally nothing in return?

Were you trying to mine with your laptops CPU?!?

Really, devs need to pull CPU miners from the repositories, or at least have them display a huge warning when launched. Too many people are hearing still hearing about Bitcoin for the first time and attempting to fire up CPU and GPU miners in search of free money.

That mistake, almost did it in the past, but notbook grafics already heat alot just for playing, imagine mining with that poor coolers theyhave would burn themselfs i minutes. Even on a gamer one... They just can't handle neither Cpu or Gpu mining, and well it wouldn't be worth mining with those even if they could

I remember when i first tried it and left my system running for whole night to find it off in the morning because of heat.
Just get your fan + Heat Sync changed and i think it'll be okay .
Avoid CPU mining , you won't even make a penny with it

I mine with my toaster, helping the bitcoin mining get more centralized with each toasted bread.

There are tons of threads warning not to mine with a laptop.  They just do not have the airflow needed.   And if something goes wrong you have to RMA entire laptop not just GPU, assuming still in warranty.

And chances are you lose money if you count electricity on cpu/gpu mining.

If you were mining with a GPU on a y510p and have the dual GPU model, chances are you fried the secondary GPU.   The fan is tiny and inadequate in it.   Try taking the SLI gpu out and see if it works like that.

i dont know why you would bother mining with a laptop... youd get close to nothing, quite literally. it shouldnt be fried as you think from just a few hours of mining, but i suggest you never do it again, too much risk for literally no gain.

he was mining magi probably, if he was aiming at some altcoin, but even doing this is not really profitable, the diff of magi should be very high already

no point in mining with cpu anymore doesn not matter if with bitcoin or altcoin

Ok, so I went ahead and did the system restore and the laptop is now working. But it's much slower and it feels hotter and it makes more noise than it did before. Does this mean the fan is broken?

I see everyone is underlining how stupid it was of me to mine on this laptop. I agree, I just didn't do my homework beforehand and I won't be mining again.

Biggest question is it still under warranty?    If it is I would send it back and get it fixed.

If it's out of warranty you have a battle on your hand.  Laptops are not really made for you to change out things like a desktop.  They might give you access to RAM if lucky but a lot of it is off limits and hard to get to.  And void warranty possibly by opening it.

Agreed.  How dirty/dusty is your place?  Do you have pets?  Unplug it, remove battery, remove case to expose the fan and give it a good blow job and a lube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPyHBH3WwBM

Edit:  If it's still in warranty, take it back and let THEM fix it.  Opening your case may void your warranty!

well lessons learned, don't try to mine bitcoins using your laptop. it will damage it and it will also cost you electricity without gaining anything

bitcoin mining generates a lot of heat an on a laptop it will quickly destroy the system as it can't disperse heat quickly. besides mining with anything other than a high rated basically is just a waste of time.
sorry about ur laptop, its best to have it repaired.