[wannabe1]

Try giving it another cleaning. It would be nice to see these temps all in the 30 to 36 degree range. Laptops tend to run a little warmer, but 47* is hot even for them. Also check the fans. Do they all spin freely and without noise? The fact that your fan is slowing down as the temperature rises is a bit troubling.

Be careful in there...it's easy to damage delicate components. Always touch a metal part of the case before doing anything to discharge any static to ground.

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I should get a chance to do this in the next 1-2 days. I've done some work inside the case before, but never touched the CPU/Heatsink area, so forgive any clueless questions I might ask here.

How sensitive is the CPU area? Is it advisable to try unscrewing the fan from the heatsink and cleaning them individually, or should I just try to clean the whole assembly as is?

[anthom]

I should get a chance to do this in the next 1-2 days. I've done some work inside the case before, but never touched the CPU/Heatsink area, so forgive any clueless questions I might ask here.

How sensitive is the CPU area? Is it advisable to try unscrewing the fan from the heatsink and cleaning them individually, or should I just try to clean the whole assembly as is?

[anzenketh]

Clean as is clean the fans with q Tips and don't blow compressed air on them so they spin it can ruin the fans. Unless you know what you are doing I would not remove it. It is not to sensetive but it can be broken. If you do not feel confertable takeing care of it you may need to take it in for repair to have them put on some new thermal grease.

[anthom]

I kept it all together and cleaned what dust I could off the fans, then blew some air through the fins of the heatsink. I'm not positive that I got it all, but I can see a difference already.

Bootup temperature is better - it starts off at 34 instead of 44. However, leaving it on for a while still brings it up to around 41 or 42 degrees.

The fan noise is also much steadier. "Without noise" is a relative term for this system, as the stock heatsink fan has always been pretty obnoxious, but recently it had become louder and more annoying - now it's back to the usual whine.

Oh, and right before shutting down to clean out the dust, I got one more blue screen.

Edited by anthom, 23 May 2007 - 07:42 PM.

[wannabe1]

That might be enough. Let me know if the machine hangs again or BSOD's.

It might be time to look into some new fans.

[anthom]

The system did freeze up again right after I ran Speed Fan to get the last batch of temperatures.

I had minimized Speed Fan and was surfing a page on last.fm with Firefox, attempting to use their flash player widget, when the screen went blank as if it was going to a blue screen, but nothing else appeared. Right before the screen blanked, my CPU temp was 42 degrees.

It took me about 7-8 tries to boot up again, as I ran into the "won't POST" issue that I mentioned in my initial message. I ended up having to wait about 2 minutes before the system would let me reboot.