Laptop cooling system not working?

I have a toshiba c660 2e1. It's not a very good laptop, I got it for christmas a year ago. It's been in to repair 4 times since then. I'd buy a new one if I could but can't afford a new one at the moment and have a lot of assignments to do so am gonna have to make it do.

Recently a rattling noise could be heard sometimes, even if I wasnt moving the laptop around and a friend said it was most likely something in the fan. Sometimes what looked like steam or smoke would come out of the vents. This rattling noise going around could be heard a few times a day. Today my dad unscrewed one side of the underneath of my laptop and turned my laptop on its side and a few bits of something fell out, just looked like some kind of dirt or something. I turned my laptop back on and this message appears 'Warning: a problem with the cooling system has been detected. Please turn off the computer immediately, and return it for service.' I have never had this message appear before. This may be a stupid question but is it dangerous to continue to use the laptop? Would it be wise to fully take the underneath off and get at the fan and see if dust or anything is clogging up the fan? I'm not the wisest person when it comes to computer but its no longer under warantee not that the warantee was much good because toshibha refused to repair anything even though I had warantee. It had to get repaired under a computer company called mercom who were really good, was on home contents insurance, but since I left home my mum took it off. Any help would be massively appreciated thanks

Personally if you don't know what you're doing I'd get it done professionally, it seems like already by your dad messing around with it it's done it more harm than good. If it is a problem with the fan and you continue using it you could end up frying the whole system. Personally I'd send it in.

I rang my mum & found out its still insured by barclays so its getting sent to them on monday, Im currently using my laptop but not gonna use anything that could overheat it and will limit my cpu usage as I've got to get this assignment done and Ive got no other way. Will ask college if I can borrow a laptop though as I think it will be away for weeks

Glad you've got it sorted, hope it gets fixed!

It's a Toshiba... ditch it.

Keep using it till it burns itself out then get a new decent one off the insurance?

I had this exact problem because I spilled nail polish remover all over the underneath of it by accident :'(

I took it in for servicing and it came back much better for 24 hours, but then without any warning or anything, it got terrifyingly hot and shut itself down. When I turned it back on a few hours later, everything was so slow it would take three minutes just to load a page!

When I took it back into the shop to complain 'cause they'd obviously done more harm than anything else, they just told me I must have done something to it myself (which I hadn't). Sorry I couldn't help, but I'd be interested if anybody else had any advice other than "take it into a shop" 'cause that didn't work :'(

It isn't exactly dangerous to use it when the fan is broken, if it overheats as badly as my Toshiba does then it won't last longer than five minutes without the fan so yeah. The CPU on my laptop hits nearly 90° at times.

Get rid of it when you can.