It's been a bit hot in London this past few weeks, and my computer's been suffering.

It's been crashing while playing games (currently working through Half-Life 2 for the second time), so I've been avoiding playing games.

Today, it crashed twice while encoding some music, so it's not the graphics card. I recently downloaded a CPU temperature monitoring utility which today had the CPU temps at around 63C (with a desk fan helping).

When it crashed the second time, I popped off the lid and cleaned all of the dust out of the fans, heatsinks etc.. There was quite a lot.

Put it all back together, and it's running at 60-61C while transcoding FLAC to MP3 (without the desk fan).

So, a tip: before upgrading your fans to better cool your PC, consider cleaning all of the crud out first.

I'm going to try some HL2 later and see what happens.

Ive known some people to put dryer sheets in front of the fan attached to the grills to help filter alot of the incomming dust.