I've had a Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop that has been giving me headaches for years now. About 10 minutes after I boot up the computer, the laptop's fan turns on full force and stays on until I shut down. As soon as this happens, My CPU usage spikes to 100% and stays there until I shut down, causing applications to run excrutiatingly slow or not run at all.

I've tried all kinds of things to fix this problem. I've opened task manager to see what application is eating all the CPU and it coincides with whatever the main application I'm trying to use is. For example, if I'm using Internet Explorer, then explorer.exe is sucking up most of the CPU, if I'm using Roxio, then Roxio is sucking up most of the CPU, etc. I've run all kinds of AntiVirus and Spyware programs to detect a problem and nothing. I've even cleaned off the hard drive and rebooted Windows XP and the problem still persists. Can anyone help me figure out what's going on with this computer and how I can fix it?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

When was the last time you opened up your laptop and cleaned it out?

You prob need to flip it over take the cover off where the processor is, blow the dust off the fan, take off the heatsink, clean off the old thermal paste on both the processor and heatsink and apply a grain size of some artic silver thermal paste that you can pick up at a local computer store for 5 bucks.

Adding another 256mb of ram sure wouldn't hurt either.