Customer had a corrupt registry with his PC.

I fixed it, but I did notice that the air coming out the rear exhaust fan was very warm (warmer than the air coming out the power supply just above).

I take a quick look, and I see its a pentium D 805 (2.66 Mhz)

I use my fingers, and notice that the CPU heatsink is quite hot. I also notice the motherboard northbridge heatsink, seagate hard drive, 2 sticks of ddr2 533mhz ram (with heat spreader), are all very warm…

The cpu heatsink is a standard intel heatsink/fan, and seems to be running at full speed most of the time. I made sure the heatsink is free of dust buildup, and I check that the heatsink is making good contact with the CPU.

There is a lot of heat inside this box, so its not too surprising that things are starting to fail.

I ran some heat monitor programs (speedfan and sensorsview) and the cpu temp was 70c at idle !!!

I ran 2 copies of “cpu burn in” (one per core), and the temperature climbed to 84c

Remove the side case panel, and the cpu temperature dropped to 74c

I then went into the bios, and underclocked the cpu (changed bus speed from 133 mhz to 100mhz)… so the cpu dropped from 2.66 mhz to 2.0 mhz.

Repeating the tests, I found that without the side panel, the temp dropped to 71c (and all the other components were still quite warm to touch). At idle, the CPU was 65c.

In summary: not good… The system life is going to be short.

Customer agrees, and we look at upgrading to a reasonable core2 duo system.