my sisters got a 3 year old computer and she recently complained that it sounds like a race car when she watched videos. i have repeatedly told her to bring her computer home so i can put a new fan in for her but she has not listened. one week ago she told me "the noise stopped, hurray!" i figure the fan gave up on her completely. now she complains that her computer is drastically slower/ some large memory using applications dont work. im wondering if it is possible that some of the memory registers or transistors in either her cpu or grafix card blew out because of overheating. can this happen without rendering the computer completely unusable? can overheating cause temporary or perminent slowing in another way?

"can overheating cause temporary or perminent slowing in another way?"

It's called "throttling". When a CPU reaches a certain "trigger temp", it will automatically underclock itself in an attempt to lower the temp. If the temp continues to rise, it will eventually shutdown completely to protect itself from burning out.

Other than temperature issues, check for viruses & spyware. Use a cleanup utility such as CCleaner to purge all the accumulated internet crap & temp files. Run MSCONFIG to prevent unnecessary programs from loading at startup. And defrag the drive regularly.

How to use MSCONFIG in WinXP

thanx, now i know whats going on in her computer. i dont know about the scanners though, ive been very hesitent to use scanners ever since spybot one day decided to delete my kazaa. ever since then ive ritually backed up my data and formatted whenever something went wrong. someone told me that formatting my computer too many times was bad for it but i didnt believe him.

Kazaa is loaded with spyware & cannot run without it. Spybot didn't delete Kazaa itself, it deleted the imbedded spyware. There used to be a program called KLite which is basically Kazaa without the spyware, but I don't know if it's available anymore. Bottom line is you should NOT be running Kazaa!

For Spyware removal, try SuperAntiSpyware. And I highly recommend CCleaner. You can get them both here:

http://www.filehippo.com

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...

no it was klite! it didnt actually delete it, i read what spybot wanted to delete before pressing delete. there were catogories of viruses, spyware, worms etc... and P2P SHARING PROGRAMS, underwhich all my klite was. spybot was once reliable, but ever since that update, i have never trusted any scanner what-so-ever. plus with all the false positives those things have... i got all kinds of crazy things on my hard drive that could set those things off, like operating systme installers, driver installers, partition magic etc.

I workship spybot&sd and i am using only emule and Bit Torrent. I would stick to simplicity and install as few programs as possible and make backup of the boot partition so i don't have to reinstall everything again because i occasionally download a few viruses for myself 8)

And yeah Kazaa sucks and its users have been sued!

i didnt know that, that must be why there was nothing on kazaa near the time i stopped using it. have any of the torrent engines been sued?