how "hot" is "hot" for a laptop?

recently my sister noticed her laptop was getting hot, so I gave it a good blow with some air and it still gets rather hot, on idle it is 48°C and upon a stress test with Prim95 it went upto 89ºC in under 15 minutes

HERE is the proc info

I notice it says 100ºC but at 89ºC thats prety damn close!!!

is this normal for a laptop?, or is there a way I can lower the temps? (I put a cooling mat under it and the temps dropped roughly 10ºC

That's almost 200 F

If that is CPU temp, it is way too warm most CPU (not GPU) starts to suffer past 70C and very few can survive 80+

Is the fan in the laptop working? Any dust? If it's not in warranty, I'd take it apart carefully to check for dust buildup that may be restricting air flow, making sure that all fans are working, and that heat sink is seated properly over CPU.

thats normal for a laptop but it might be a little dusty, my laptop has been running 84c load for a couple years now

It might not be as bad as you think. It's hot but those mobile intel chips can take a beating. For example, people run folding@home with Mac minis using upgraded C2D chips that routinely run temps in the 80s and 90s with no ill effects. A laptop is not designed to be ran at 100% processor load for extended periods like you are doing with P95.

4GHz_or_bust's recommendation to take it apart and clean it is a good one, provided it is not in warranty. I personally wouldn't worry about it, but then again it's not my laptop.

PS: don't ever rest the laptop on your lap. Those temps can do serious damage to genitalia.

With my gaming laptop, I just use a simple desk fan next to it, with it raised. Due to my amount of RAM and powerful graphics card, my Proc fan is TINY! So I need to keep it cool.

I apologise for how cocky that sounded XD

Besides cleaning out dust have you thought about grabbing one of these? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834998051

Its not the same kind I used to use but there was a large drop overall.

or this which went on sale :http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-Details.asp?EdpNo=5233224&sku=T925-1324

I don't know how old this laptop is or if the temp is considerably higher than it once was but idling at 48C for most laptops is OK as most of them cut the fan on and off around that area. 89C running prime is OK also and within limits, that probably will stress the laptop more than anything it normally does anyway. One thing to remember about laptop cooling is you don't control the fan speed.

If you feel that it is excessive or worse than it used to be then you might want to take the heatsink out for a deep cleaning and put new thermal paste on the CPU. Sometimes a dust bunny can get trapped behind the grill and blowing air will not clear it and of course thermal paste does degrade over time, especially the junk the OEM's use. Removing the heatsink is easy on some notebooks and difficult on others so find the service manual (look in the sticky thread in this forum) to find out about yours.

My ACER 5536 hits 81-83'c on P95 out of the box. I got it in 2-3 weeks ago and ran tests to make sure the laptop doesnt overheat. Left it over night, went to school and came back and it was good and steady. Laptops cpu's are ment to be much hotter than desktops. What you could do is buy an external usb cooler to clip on to where your hot air is being released from, it drastically reduce temps but will help cool it down a bit.

You should try under volting the cpu. I was running 80 degrees load with orthos early today and now I am running 63 degrees load after under volting . Just make sure you are orthos stable and don't have any bsod's and your set. It's also a great idea to do this at idle if you don't run your cpu at 100% usage at all times.

100*c is the cap, 99*c is fine for laptop chips.
Laptop GPUs can take very high temps, too.
These days, you can't really fry a laptop cpu, it's impossible.

my lappy runs at 80+ and it has been running like that for years since day one.. you are fine.