You may remember I wrote about the heatsink being clogged with filth, and that I couldn’t do anything for any period of time without it croaking.

Fixed it! Using the wonderful tools of my mouth, and the ripped-off corner of a phone bill.

Once again, it crashed while I wasn’t doing anything particularly CPU intensive - IRC and Winamp. That was it. So, I checked the temperature… 78 degrees. Ergh. Something had to be done.

So I powered off.

Using the piece of paper, I scraped as much of the dust off as I could. Due to the position and angle of fan blades, things such as toothbrushes are out of the question for this task. But a carefully placed piece of paper got in there just fine. The remainder was just simply removed by blowing it.

As soon as I powered on, I could feel the draught coming out of the side of the heatsink. Hadn’t felt that for a while!

So, onto MAME, previously my arch nemesis. Played through a game, and expected it to cop out halfway through. Nope. After completing said game (oh, I’m such a pro), I rebooted, and noticed that the temperature was down to 68 degrees!! Not ideal, no, but it’s 10 degrees cooler under load. That’s quite remarkable, as David Coleman would say.

Naturally, I wouldn’t recommend using this technique, but am I FOOK going to pay £6.99 for a can of compressed air.