I noticed by old PC was running hot when I *accidentally* ran CoreTemp (I was trying to run another program using search from the Windows Menu). 61C at idle seemed a bit high, 68C when running loads moreso.

Thought it was time for a cleanout, so I took it apart, vacuumed the heck out of the inside of the case, got the sticky dust off of the cards and the motherboard with a nylon paintbrush. Took the CPU cooler off, dusted off the heatsink, cleaned all of the fans thoroughly. Removed the dried thermal paste with alcohol and cotton swabs, and placed a thin coating of new paste on the CPU. One last blow-out with compressed air, re-assembled the case, fired it up, and now my system is running at 29C.

Not bad for 30 minutes' work.

New computers are a LOT easier to work on than when I started fixing PCs. Remember masses of too-long tangled ribbon cables, multiple ISA cards for IO, and full-height disk drives?