Before you blame lag...

Before you blame your drivers...

Have a look inside that case. Be prepared, though. It gets ugly.:D

Ventblockers 2!!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/26/ventblockers_2/

Computers, especially desktops, are dust magnets. Seriously, like, the electronics seem to attract dust or something.

So, yeah. If your computer is screwing the hell up, might want to open it up and do a bit of internal spring cleaning or such.

Wanna know what happens when you run a SLI setup with crappy 8500s with only one poorly working fan in the case? I found out the hard way. My mobo turned into Ryvita.

OMG ! - Some of those were truely lol-worthy!, roasted ants, cockroaches and spider colonies?, the hospital fungus and builders-workshop PC were funny too.
The more powerful your rig and graphics card - the more powerful the fan suckage! - you really should open up your PC at least twice a year and give it a careful spring clean. We've got two persian cats here (one of them a long hair) and hair and I notice on the bi-annual clean that dust gets everywhere.

Yep, twice-a-year springclean to get rid of all the dustbunnies™, Cling-ons™ and dangleberries™.

Last week my computer froze a few times while playing CO, and the frozen image was corrupted by graphics artifacts. I used this page to help diagnose the problem, and the images I was getting were somewhere between the Guild Wars picture they used to illustrate GPU artifacts, and the Battlefield2 (?) picture they used to illustrate bus artifacts. Either way this helped me decide that it was an overheating issue, as opposed to a software issue.

It took me a bit of searching to find this simple hardware monitor program that worked better on my system than the other free programs I tried. This confirmed I had a temperature problem, with my system locking up whenever my 9800GTX got to 75C or so.

Next thing I set out to do was increase the speed of my GPU fan to the maximum safe load, since I play with headphones and was not worried about the noise. I tried to do this with Nvidia's official system tools, but everytime I had it adjust the fan speed Windows would crash in a blue screen of death. I gave up on Nvidia, and sought out the software directly from my video card's manufacturer, EVGA and their Precision Tuner. This software works great, and will incentivize me to buy my next video card from EVGA. I set my fan speed to its max RPM, and as a bonus the precision tuner let me underclock the video card, to help it run even cooler.

The fan improvements and underclocking (about -10% to my video card's performance) brought the temperature down to about 65C, with no loss of performance in CO (since the game is apparently CPU bound by my configuration, except for very occasional particle effects that I had to turn down).

The next day I picked up the gas duster, blasted out all my fans, and and now the GPU is down to about 55-60C under load in CO. Also, my core 2 duo processor dropped from ~65C to ~45C under load.

Oh yes. The "Can O' Air" is your friend! Make sure you get all the dust out of your processor heat sink! If you're getting crazy crashes or insane temps I bet theres some nasty ass gunk in your heatsink. Blast it out of there!

.... horrors like that are why Ilike having a clear lexan panel on the side of my computer. I can just LOOK INSIDE, and see when it's getting a it dusty, and needs some "quality time" with the compressed-air can. :)

I once cleaned out my brothers micro computer. Due to weird air currents inside it was literally a forest of dust. Possibly with small dust bunnies prancing about the 4 inch tall dust trees.
Needed a hoover to clear that out, a compressed air can would've just cried.

I once found a wooly mammoth inside my old 'puter. It was really old computer. I think it just discovered fire, because there was a bit of smoke.

Twice a year minimum.
The more powerful the "suckage" ( ;) ) the more dust flows in.

I just cleaned my computer a month ago, and after reading this i decided to look at it again...
...OMG!

Yeah, look inside every month on a new computer i'd wager...