If you are like me and have an Athlon system that is prone to heat issues in the summer don't stop worrying about it during the winter. I ignored mine, and let it sit runnign 24/7 since november withought cleaning or checkign shit out. Here is why.....
Pc has been doing random reboots and BSOD's lately, so i ignored the warnings and went on as usual. Tonight I was posting in one of Nina's threads and as I hit submit my screen went black, piercing high pitched squeeling from the speakers and the cd drive kept shuffling. So I powered down, opened case and almost died from the dust. What I found after laying teh pc on its side under a light totaly shocked me. I found a cpu that hit 80 degrees C and a geforce 4 that had a stuck fan.
I then cleaned it out with alot of q-tips and paper corners. I then removed the cpu heatsink fan. This is what I found beneath it.... sad isn't it? There is no way I got air through that bitch.
The fan is fucking nasty.. thank god for q-tips and watter.
SO I got it all cleaned up and air moving nicely everywhere,..... then came teh two hours getting this POS to boot.
BSOD's of hell!
Stop errors galore, freezes galore.
Even the xp installer couldn't boot
FInally had to reset bios and laod optimal settings and jump my fsb down to 200 mhz to get windows to even start to boot. A few full sentence curses later it booted!
That's fucking it.... I'm getting a damn p4 that can handle the heat. As much as I hate their sloppy pipelines,,, i hate heat more.