John Reinke wrote: > > > Yet another problem I've had that you reminded me of - the CPU fan will > occasionally speed up and slow down. I've seen it stop almost completely, > too. Sometimes, it makes a nasty rattling sound, but it seems to be > attached well enough to the CPU that it shouldn't fall off. I've seen that > the BIOS knows what speed the CPU fan is turning - is that how the fan can > affect the computer? I've never seen the CPU get too hot. > What motherboard do you have? Some motherboards come with monitoring software that runs under Windows to let you know the temperature in a couple of places. If you have that, and can stand to run Windows for a while, maybe it would tell you something.
That alerted me to overheating when I was having a very similar situation to yours. That turned out to be a defective, cheap fan. It was BIOS-controlled, but probably just not made well enough to "keep up with" what the BIOS was wanting it to do. You might want to just get a different (hopefully, better) fan, since they're not very expensive.
