[Bubba]

Any ideas anyone?

Out of the blue, the CPU in one of my PCs has started overheating until failure.

The case temperature remains steady, but the CPU just keeps rising until I get stop errors in windows, or the system shuts itself down when the CPU temps hit around 60 degs. C.

I have a large fan on the CPU and have never had problems until I switched on this morning.

Anyone know the most likely cause?

- Power supply?
- Motherboard?
- CPU fucked?

[Stu Littlefair]

I get this every now and again because my fan gets full of dirt. Have you opened her up and given her a rub down?

[Bubba]

Cheers Stu,

Yeah, going to try that and also check if there's any thermal grease left between the fan and the cpu.

I hate hardware problems  :cry:

[Obi-Wan is lost...]

Yeah the fan can get clogged up, also if you have any cooling fins on the CPU these can get clogged. But I haven't ever had overheating problems just from this. Does it do it without any apps running? My laptop gets really hot when some app or other is misbehaving, (usually IE6! currently,  :roll: hence using Firefox more). Have you installed anything new? Does it overheat in safe mode?

[Bubba]

Not an app problem - windows boots and runs fine for a while and not running anything differently to the last couple of years over which it's been working fine.

The back of where my PCs sit is horribly dusty though, so I'm hoping a spring clean will help.

Now, time to find my teensy screwdrivers  :?

[Bubba]

Think it was dust that was the trouble - cleaned the fan and the heatsink out, and now the temp is holding < 40 degs. and also the fan speed is much higher so it must have been well clogged.

Thanks folks

[simes]

speedfan allows monitoring of several system temperatures and fan speeds:

http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php

and its free. si.

[Bubba]

Cheers - I've got MBM installed, which is a similar sort of utility, but wasn't keeping an eye on it.

Will probably give the other PCs a good clean out just to stop this happening again.

[Jim]

always worth doing. I've got a can of compressed air which is good for shit like this, although I believe it costs about £10 a can I wouldn't actually buy one myself  :wink:
also a smallish paintbrush is a cheaper option

[Obi-Wan is lost...]

always worth doing. I've got a can of compressed air which is good for shit like this,

It is good stuff, but you need to be bloody careful with it, if you shake it or tip it too much you'll fire liquid air onto your motherboard/ram etc, effectively freezing it.  :shock:  RAM doesn't like being frozen.

[Control freak]

I find a hoover does the job just fine