I had a very simple problem of overheating CPU which was a source of consternation in my four-person household. I was working office hours during the day, and m

I had a very simple problem of overheating CPU which was a source of consternation in my four-person household. I was working office hours during the day, and my girlfriend would use my home-built 486 PC for art and Internet access during the day. It was summer in San Jose. Girlfriend began to complain how unreliable my machine was, and I thought she was certainly daft, because it never ever crashed on me while I was using it intensively. I continued to discredit her experience until we moved out, at which point I opened the PC's case to discover that the CPU fan had become dislodged and wasn't effective for cooling the toasty little 486DX100, which was surely catastrophic in Silicon Valley's summer heat, and so I was finally able to accept girlfriend's testimony about how unreliable the thing was! Fast forward about 20 years; my father complained that his laptop locked up constantly, and I told him to get a nice cooling pad for it because he literally held it in his lap while using it. He took my advice and using it on the cooling pad eliminated the heat lockups, even without running the fans it included.