A lil help with my brothers dell

[kotfquig]

ok it seems that once a week someones askin me for help with their computer, this week it was my brother. We come home from checking out ithica college and my mom needs to print out something, and his computer is the only one with a printer, so she goes to turn it on and it wont go on, we check all the power stuff and it wont turn on, the screen and speakers plugged into the same surge protector the cpu is plugged into and they have power but the cpu didnt, well we just let it sit and i assumed that it was the power supply because nothing in the computer was recieving power. So i called tech support and got a message "we are currently recieveing excessive calls, your wait may exceed over 30 min" so im like "fuck that i hate my brother, im not staying on hold for a half hour to get some jerk"
so just now he tried it and it worked! and im like WTF?!!! now im thinking mayb it overheated? as it might have been left on for the last three days, it was pretty warm in his room, and his fan was pretty dusty, and i had left the case open for several hours before he tried it again and it had time to air out. So i dont really want him on it until i figure out wtf is going on with it
he has a dell dimension 4800 pc, with 512 megs of ram, pentium 4 processor, 120 gig hard drive, dvd rom drive,and cd burner so i dont think it should really get tooo hot. But then again if you know n e thing about dell pc's in mine and his there is no cooling fan over the processor, there is just a plastic thing sucking the air from a heat plate over the processor to the fan, and when i saw this this kinda pissed me off but w/e.
so its not urgent because its working, but im one of those kind of people that just want to know why a computer is doing what its doint

[Johnny Mullet]

Mine did that one time. That plastic air deflector for the fan is crappy, but it works. I pulled mine back and found a shit-load of dust, dirt, and debris in there! Clean all of that out.

[kotfquig]

yea, my mom is gona give me a shitload of money to upgrade his for college because it would be cheaper to upgrade stuff then get a newer better one (plus hes not to good with electronics so there is no need for a laptop :-P) but ill probably pick up two cooling fans, one for his and one for mine

but still one question, there wasnt a whole ton of dust back there, i mean i had seen more in mine one time in the summer and it didnt over heat, so...?
is mine just better off the bat? :-P
thanks for responding n e way

[Johnny Mullet]

Depends on the proccesor. Some can take heat better than others.

[Deimos]

Over the past year or two now, I've noticed that AMD's take heat better than Intel, but it is still really important to keep your computer nice and cool.

[kotfquig]

yea thanks, i always knew the cooling in our computers was shitty, but i never thought it was n e thing too bad as i figured dell would allow the computer to work in 80-100 temps but i guess i was wrong
o well ive been checking out some fans and stuff and i can get some really good ones for BOTH my comp and my bros for about 40 bucks, which i dont think is too bad (considering its about 3 new fans per each computer :-P)