It took me a year but...

WARNING: GEEK SPEAK TO FOLLOW

Last year, with our hard earned tax refund, I bought some computer upgrades. It's been almost a full year to the day and I just now got them running right. Aren't I a great computer tech? I could never get my processor to run at full speed without the machine locking up. I know I went out on a weekly basis and searched the tech forums to find an answer. This last week I found the right forum at the right time that told me about a jumper I hadn't tried yet. I moved the jumper, the processer was being detected correctly. All is well; or so I thought. My processor was getting way too hot. Most tech briefs I could find said that my processor should hang out in the 40C - 50C degree range. Mine was hitting 60C just idling in the BIOS. Whenever I would try to put my case back together the temperature would climb over 70C. The specs on my chip say max temp is 85C. This was with the machine just doing nothing. I've been running for a week with the side off and a small box fan blowing in my machine. I stopped last night on my way home and talked to Jared at BT Computers about it. Not knowing my background in PC's Jared talked to me like a "normal user" and I thank him for that. It's amazing how much of the basic stuff you immediatly overlook. Here's what I gathered from him; 1) proper airflow and 2) dust. I went home and dug through my PC graveyard in the basement and found a small fan. I installed it on the back of my case pulling air in and across the processor. The fan on the side of my case pulls hot air out from above the processor. It's like a little wind tunnel around my processor. Then I got a flashlight and looked at the cpu heatsink. It should look kind of like a comb from the top; little ridges. Mine looked like a desert from the top; packed with dust. I blew the dust out and hooked everything back up. I put the side of the case on and booted into the BIOS to check temperature. After running for 30 minutes the temp had only risen to 49C. I went on into Windows and hopped into a graphic intensive game for about 30 minutes (if you ask my wife she'll say it was more like an hour). I came back out and checked the temp; 53C. So after a year of banging my head against a wall and talking to every techie I knew, the basics fixed my problem. I think I've stumbled across a theme here. Don't make things harder than they are by overlooking the basic solutions. We tend to jump over the "easy" things and start problem solving on step 5 without even checking step 1-4. Now that my machine is working right again, tax refunds are coming in. Maybe it's time for an upgrade....