Action Pants

I work on a Dell Latitude D820. It's got a 2 ghz processor and 2 GB of ram. I am a big fan of Dell, I haven't really had issues in the past with their hardware and when I have had a problem they have taken care of me. The other day I noticed that when I was doing certain things like powering up a virtual machine or watching a movie, my processor would throttle down around 997mhz. I knew that speed wasn't going to work out for me so I went and downloaded a program called SpeedSwitch to try and force my power settings to keep the processor up to speed. I had used this program in the past with other laptops when I wanted to get the best performance from the machine when on battery. After playing around with settings and some restarting I was still getting the same response from the processor when doing somewhat intensive things. I then decided to contact Dell's online support and see if they could shed any light on my issues. They ran me through flashing the BIOS back to a previous version as well as disabling all non-essential applications on startup. None of this fixed the problem. I have Dell's in home service so they went ahead and scheduled a tech to come out to my place and replace the processor because it seemed to be faulty. The day the tech was suppose to come, I decided to take my laptop off the dock and spray it out a little in preparation for it be taken apart. After I did that and booted it back up. It worked fine. It seemed that there was enough dust in the computer to inhibit the cooling of the processor. I didn't thing that could ever be a problem, but the symptoms all make sense when you apply that situation. I just thought I would share my experience for anyone that might run into a similar situation.