Hello to Everyone:  I have a friend who has a compaq presario desktop pc.
Recently she has had problems with her pc blue screening randomly.  It seems
to happen 30-45min. after she boots up her pc.  I noticed that her pc was
running extremely hot, I removed the case and noticed that the pc was very
dusty inside so I used some canned air and removed the dust from inside the
pc.  I can't see any fan inside the pc aside from the small cpu fan, I guess
the form factor of this pc is so small that it didn't allow for a fan.  Even
after removing all of the accumulated dust & dirt, the pc still runs
extremely hot and blue screens after 45-60min. of operation.  I recommended
moving her pc to her basement where it's cooler and leaving the tower case
off and since then it's running fine, no more blue screens that cause her pc
to fail.  I'm wondering if there could be problems resulting from running
her pc without it's case on.  It runs cooler now so it doesn't blue screen
anymore (or as much) but a basement can be more cool and humid than other
areas of the house and I'm wondering if other problems can happen from
running her pc this way.  Another question is why does the pc blue screen if
it gets hot inside?  She has had this pc for @ 4 years and it only recently
started experiencing these problems, she's wondering why all of a sudden is
this an issue, it's run like this for years.  Does the hot temperature cause
the harddrive, or the ram to malfunction in some way? The harddrive is new,
I helped her purchase it a year ago but the rest of the pc still uses it's
original components. A few months ago I have reinstalled win98 along with
other apps because I originally thought it was an os related problem but I
don't think that's the issue any more.  Any insight you may on this issue
would be appreciated.

thx for your help,
rob,wpg

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