Laptop on stage: closed lid?

[The Kid]

I like to keep the lid of my laptop closed when playing on stage.
I did it for years, then after a couple of years of using the laptop in the studio, it started to glitch whith mid-large projects.
Can it be that it got overheated for playing with the lid closed?
Please tell me no, it'll be fine :D
I hate the screen on stage!
PD: In the mid of those gigging years, a volcano erupted and ashes were all over the place. I had to change the cooler of the laptop because ashes got to it.
Maybe the failure has nothing to do with the lid?
I'm planning to take my only laptop to gigs.

[clepsydrae]

Some laptops do cool better with the lid open; I have had the experience where a closed laptop gets hot and starts throttling the CPU. Not sure if the happens to modern laptops as often, but I've definitely seen it.

You could easily test it by running some software that charts CPU temps over time, a stress test, and then leaving the lid closed or open.

You can also tweak your BIOS/OS to prevent CPU throttling, though this comes with obvious risks of overheating if you're not careful.

You might also try the lid open just an inch or two... if you run a program to turn the screen off (to prevent annoying glow), this might be acceptable on stage... just cracking it a bit can make a difference for airflow.

You could use a small external fan... or maybe at a thrift store you can find one of those fan-based laptop cooling stands.

If the new cooler you installed wasn't installed properly, that could also be an issue -- e.g. you cleaned off the old thermal interface well and used a good thermal compound?

You could also get a little mini-form-factor desktop and only attach a mini monitor to it when you need to (e.g. intel NUC (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/details/nuc.html) style... not recommending those in particular, just the form factor.) Some of them are pretty cheap.

Or maybe it has nothing to do with heat and was a fluke. :-)