Excellent advice. I'm glad your computer was fixable.

we also have dogs and a cat and i know that the hair and everything is another issue for pc users especially because cats like the heat generated by your Powersupply.
Thats why informed myself a lot in the past what you can actually do to get rid of both the dust and the hair blocking your fans.

I talked to 3 mayor geeks in the case business, and they said that i dont have to be afraid of overheating my hardware sicne if you didnt overclock your hardware nothing will happen.
So first i started with blocking the noise generated by my PC, i bought some Be quit plates and cutted and glued them into my case.
Those things block the noise and allow less dust to come into your case aswell.
Another good thing is it to buy fan dust blockers. They come in diffrent sizes and they are perfect i have 1x120mm fan in my pc and thats it fresh air isnt going into my pc.. But my pc is never over 24-30 degree Celsius inside .
Im looking forward to get myself a even better tower i was thinking a lot about it to not buy a cheap one again.You know those towers that cost 30-70bucks.
I found a tower thats close to perfect and looks very stylish yet minimalistic : Lian Li PC-B25FB it comes with dust blockers a nice layout and it is of course user friendly.And its already based on silence.You can see a video about it on Ytube.
It has 2x140mm and 3x120mm fans quality fans not the cheap things already build in each with a dust blocker.
here is the vid
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vbrlviM1EE&feature=player_embedded

oye...... I'm not sayin' a fuckin' word......

dreadful pun.

Don't forget to check the heatsinks, especially that pesky little one sitting on the graphics card/chipset.  Those suckers get plugged up and they will get hot.

My question is how come you weren't aware of the cooling issue don't all cpu fans automatically switch to full blow when temps get to a certain point on the cpu,both of mine do just that usually in summer when humidity gets real high or if heatsink gets full of gunk tho the gunk is less of an issue once i used thin 3-4mm air filter foam to cover the inflow ducts on the tower,dust still gets in thru gaps between dvd rom drives & just about everwhere else..lol..however i do open the side plate to check for dust every 3-4 months so the foams doing it's job there's very little to clean off

I fixed one for a friend a little while back...they couldnt figure out what was wrong,it crashed frequently.

The heatsink was so clogged up you couldnt see that it had any fins.

I can take it apart easily enough. Not worried on that score. I'm pretty good doing that sort of thing. My first computer was a home built made from discards. Worked.

I have an HP laptop that gets really hot! Especially when I'm rendering an image in Bryce 7. I render using high settings and about 15 min. into it, the bottom of my laptop is hot enough to almost burn me. It keeps plugging away, which is pretty amazing! Maybe I need to clean the insides! It could be fairly plugged in there, since it's 2 years old! Great advice Chasbo!

I just took my pc apart and vacuumed the poor plugged up thing yesterday. It was unreal. Where does all that dust come from? That's what I want to know. And I installed my new graphics card.  I forgot I had to plug in my desktop to it. It came back to me but, it's those little things that can drive one nuts isn't it?  I also got 2tb of extended hard drive to go with my Acronis.    Yes Doc. No more worries. I was thinking of you when I was setting it up.   You'd be proud. 

I had no idea. I will do that starkers.    No more sucking. I actually was thinking of getting one of those cans. I do my own upgrades and such to my pc. My first pc was my learning tool. So far, no shocks. I am careful. But how bad can it be?

Ooooh, really. Had no idea of that either. Destroy a RAM stick. That sounds real bad. I was under the impression if I kept one hand one the inside of my computer I was grounded.....   Myth or fact?    {it was written in my graphics card instructions}