On Fri, 9 Apr 2010 08:29:32 -0700 (PDT), "hr(bob) "
wrote:

On Apr 8, 10:36*am, "William Sommerwerck"
wrote:
Soft paint brush and some compressed air
will make it much happier.

A few months back I cleaned the fan on the processor, and the heat sink on
the graphics card. There was a noticeable drop in their temperature.
(Neither had been cleaned in nine years.)

My son had to clean my wife's laptop computer fan when it started
getting noisy. She is not a neat/clean-nick, but keeps her computer
area clean, and it still partially clogged the fan fins after about 3
years. Now it runs nice and cool and quiet.

Well, I did clean the fan about 4 months ago when I had it on the work
bench to replace the video card with a faster one.

But I didn't take the fan off or attempt to clean the heat sink fins.
And I think that's probably the biggest cause.

Yesterday, the high temp outside was 60 degrees, instead of 89 when I
first posted, and since I no longer had the heat on, it must have been
60 to 64 inside, and the computer didn't get above 136 degrees, even
with lots of stuff running. Unlike the 148 to 154 it had been for
months, and the 159 it got to often on that hot day. I know that is
the way heat works, but it's interesting to watch.


Also, the RF Mod worked two hours after I hit it but broke again at 3
hours. Hitting it didn't work so I left it unplugged all night and
all day, and it's been working since 6 PM last night, turning on and
off when the dvdr goes on and off. (One of the bad symptoms was that
the red light on the RF Mod didnt' go off even when the DVDR providing
the signal was turned off.) But I ordered another one which should
arrive between Tuesday and Friday. 15 dollars. It only has one set
of inputs instead of a choice of 4 like this one, but I'll probably
never really need the other 3. (One extra was useful a little, but I
can do without.)

Thanks all.