Recently I had a problem where I thought my CPU was making really weird noises. When I actually opened it up, and listened, it was the videocard. Which of the two is actually making the noise?

My solution, and I'm a very not-techy person when it comes to hardware, was to take out the videocard and dissemble the videocard itself, detaching the fan from it, disassemble the fan, and using machine oil (actually, sewing machine oil) to re-grease the shaft that the fan spins in because the grease it came with apparently evaporated or something. It was actually fairly easy to do, despite my initial fear that I'd break something or that it'd be too complicated (I didn't, and it wasn't). Doing this instantly made the videocard run very silently, and dramatically helped with overheating issues - not because my computer was using alot of processing power, but because the fan was moving slower from the lack of grease and couldn't pull the normal levels of heat off the fan.

I don't get the immediate recommendation, or rather, the assumption that one has to reinstall their windows box every 6-12 months in order to keep everything smooth. Honestly, I run my Windows machine for years, and with no antivirus by, get this, not doing stupid things (and setting security settings which discourage me from doing stupid things accidentally). I've never had a problem that so borked my computer that I had to re-install. I've been bitten a couple times now and again, but nothing a little internet sluething and reg-edit couldn't fix. I pretty much only re install if I switch hard-disks, motherboard or CPU, all of which are rather rare circumstances. I usually go around 3 years between re-installs.

Premature re-installation is like burning the village to roast a pig.

I agree that just arbitrarily doing it every 6-12 months is unnecessary (unless you install a lot of programs that you don't always use). However, when you clearly have a slowdown, you can spend hours searching for the cause and a cure, whereas just reinstalling will get you back to square 1 with minimal effort. There are also some things that slow your computer that are near impossible to clean by hand (ie your registry). Doing a clean install will show a performance boost if you've been a program whore over a long period of time.

1: are sure its the fan you're hearing? could be your HD spinning up rapidly.

2: I would suspect your gpu going out before you cpu. Typically you would see artifacts if this was happening (weird graphical glitches, spots, missing textures, odd textures)

3: Typical virus, that would actually cause you damage or slow down your machine, are related to email or illegal sites. No porn is not included in that group. I doubt that is the case here.

4: assuming your talking Celsius, 40-60 is pretty optimal for an air cooled cpu. Most modern cpus, can go as high as 75-80c and still run for days with no damage. GPU's even higher.

5: when you say you "see" the processor fan spinning faster, please explain. I'm starring at my fan at the moment and it just looks like a blur.

6: Does this happen with every game you play? Does this only happen when you play games? Have you defragmented your hardrive in the past year or two? Have you modded any of these games?

7: It might seem overkill, but posting your entire specs might shine some light on possible conflicts or hardware that is know to go bad. ie theres alot of cheap products out there that are known to only last a year and start to degrade.

8: I've never reinstalled windows, except when a new build comes out. I've never had slow downs except when I've tweaked with files, settings or hardware has gone bad. And who ever said it can't be your PSU, individual rails can go bad while the other still work... it happened to me once. My old roswell 550, had a rail go bad and any time I started a game it didn't have enough power for the gpu to operate and either BSOD, or had horrible artifacts.

If you suspect you have faulty hardware (including a dud CPU), remove your hard drive immediately and back up your data on a known-good machine.

Faulty RAM (and faulty CPUs!) have a terribly bad habit of corrupting your files. What happens is:

* You think it's all fine
* Some file is loaded into memory
* A hardware fault makes it get corrupted (either during loading, in between, or during save)
* It gets saved back on to the (working) hard drive.

If you continue to use a dud machine, you'll get more and more data errors, and sooner or later you can't mount your filesystem any more. Existing good files will get destroyed. It'll end in tears.

If you see random crashes, hangs, blue-screens, etc, do not use the machine! Make a low-level backup (from a known good machine) ASAP.

This is mostly directed at those that decide to do a clean install of Windows periodically. Why not just do a clean install, install all the programs you normally use, and then make an image of it. You can restore it whenever you need to and it does not have as much of a hassle. No worries about a mile long list of updates and installations, and if I remember correctly, no worries about reaching the maximum number of times a key can be used.