Running Speccy Free has helped me a lot, likely prevented hard disk failure on one drive and perhaps a CPU core(s) meltdown;)
I had experienced sluggish performance (to put it mildly) of late; the CPU load as presented by Task Manager was forever at 50-100 percent even just loading another webpage... So sad...
And for example running Freemake Video Downloader and then converting the .flv clip to .mp3 completely overwhelmed the machine and sent the CPU load through the roof - I couldn't play music in VLC at the same time without it stuttering unbearably but had to pause it for the duration.
It was no fun. Running Speccy on April 26 to see what I could see, it looked like this:
high temperatures all around. So a short while back I disassembled the machine and, sure enough, somebody had sneakily inserted an appalling amount of dust that was trapped in the aluminum radiator and CPU fan assembly (or I hadn't looked closely enough in there last time I vacuumed inside the PC, whatever).
After vacuuming and when the dust had settled I replaced the silicon paste (which was bone-dry) with newly bought, reassembled and it's a whole different experience now to use the machine - just enjoyable as I remembered it.
However, when I ran Speccy post-vacuuming etc I got this temperature warning/OK combination on one drive which I don't understand:
Well - is the temperature OK or isn't it?
Thank you.
(Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit SP1, AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+, now at 55 °C)