From Dust to Computers

Dust and Death!
Its in the dust - can you believe it. I have been getting pretty frustrated with my laptop over the last few months. It’s been almost two years since I bought this machine - has worked flawlessly till recently - speed dropped by almost 50%! Knee-jerk reaction, I blamed windows for it - regular stuff - backed up my HDD - reformatted it - reinstalled stuff ... and convinced myself that it was running faster ... sure enough a few wells later I was back to square one - guess it wasn't Microsoft after all (OMG)

Googled 'Dell inspiron 5100 heat problems' last night - and guess what - all my computer needed was a few good blows (of air) in the ducts behind!!! DellForum

Yep! you read it right - apparently it was the dust that has been collecting on my heat-sink and fan over the months and my poor P4 processor was running dangerously hot (and slow)
I kinda figured this a while ago and even bought a cooler pad for the laptop - so as to keep the CPU cooler - but nothing helped like a few good blows of air :D
My CPU was constantly working @68C for the last few months - and since last night it’s been @50C and works a lot lot lot faster. Waiting for the weekend to go to Wal-Mart and buy a can of compressed air - to blow all the dust out!

Moral of the story - clean the heat sink and fan on your CPU and watch your computer fly :)