ACPI Driving Me Mad

[Mediaeval]

Recently I've been having a lot of crashes with my computer on TW games. I had the machine cleaned out recently and it worked better for a while, but problem now reoccurring.

I installed Speedfan to keep a monitor on temperature and that's when I noticed something really odd. At startup, the ACPI reading fluctuates in temperature from 54 degrees to 74 degrees, with no apparent reason (although, the temperature is normally one of 6 readings: 54, 55, 56.5, 62, 71.5, 74).

This is infuriating. If the temp is 54 or 55 at start, I can usually play TW games (even NTW on high settings) and when I finish, the ACPI reading remains the same (although the Graphics card heats up, as you'd expect). Anything above this (even 56.5) and the computer will crash, with an ACPI reading normally climbing to the high 70's. Today, I'd just won a hard fought victory in Roma Surrectum 2 when the machine crashed, taking me right back to start!!!! Not so bad in map mode, you simply replay the turn, but with no means of saving a battle mid-fight....

Any reason why this is happening, there seems to be neither rhyme nor reason in these fluctuating start up temperatures?

[Ishan]

Try to clean the components looks to me a lot of dirt on them is causing the abnormal rise in temps.

[irishron]

Can of compressed air can work wonders at times.