I just finished tearing my old motherboard out of its case to make way for tomorrow’s delivery and, just for my own amusement, I decided to pull the fan & heat sink off the CPU because I could see some dust chunks peeking through. Sure enough, remove the fan and the entire surface of the heat sink was just caked with dust! I pulled the chip itself out, too, and it doesn’t look singed or anything, but I’m wondering if it could’ve finally just gotten too warm to boot, but not so much that it physically burnt up.
I eventually was going to need a new computer anyways, mind you, as the old one was a single core P4 3.0 Ghz, being replaced by a quad-core 2.4 Ghz (not to mention almost 2x bus speed, faster memory standard, etc…), so I still feel justified with the purchase, although now I’m wondering if there may still be some life in this old gal, too! I’ll be curious to try to fire her up over the weekend and see if the deep cleaning and whatnot managed to breathe some life back into her … I guess that would mean I’d be one step closer to that media center PC that I keep saying I want to build… 🙂