With today's hot running PCs, you'll fight your way to get the temperature in your case to an acceptable level. Before you spend a lot of money for water cooling, or to start to cut an extra fan connectors, there are some steps you can take that will shave degrees. Taken individually, each only a small difference, but as a group, they can save your system from overheating, and that for the relatively low cost.

First and foremost, if your CPUruns hot, check the thermal gel that goes on the chip. This stuff improves heat transfer from your chip to the heatsink. I have opened computers less than one years old, and the gel was already a thin white crust of dried completely useless for the transport of heat.

Remove the chip and clean off the old gel with ArtiClear or similar cleaning solution. Install the processor. Then, if the type that has a contact area in the center of the chip, put a drop of gelon these surfaces. There should be no bigger than a large grain of rice.

If you are a chip the way the entire top surface used as a contact, you can make an X pattern from five points of the gel. To make sure the dots are tiny! A little gel goes a long way.

Next, while you have to open the case to get blow out all the dust. They have seen a white border grows along the edge of the CPU's fan blades. When the dust is so bad, it's obviously done something needs to be. Although it looksclean blow. Tiny particles cling to your components, especially the chipset, sealing in the heat.

Use canned air, or one of those super-sized bulb blower. Do not use the small compressors some hobby own. In humid climates they can spray tiny droplets of water through condensation. (This is a kind of water do you really want not!)

Finally, where is your computer located? Is she sitting in direct sunlight, absorb heat? Is it in a cubbyhole, where openings may beblocked?

Keep your computer out of the sun, in a place that is not covered in the airstream. This is the easiest step to do, and perhaps this explains why the most often overlooked.

Michael Quarles is the author of "Speed Up Your Computer" and "Building a PC for Beginners". His website is http://www.monkeyseemonkeydobooks.com

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Tags: Computer, Overheating, Solutions