Opinions please

My main pc is a tower running Win7 Home premium with a quad Q8200 precessor.

I use it to watch television with a haupauge card and Win7TV.

Recently for no apparent reason the picture began to freeze and stutter. A re-installation of WinTV7 seemed to fix it, however I did this on a day where I only actually started the computer in the evening rather than the normal running most of the time.

At first it was fine and then the problem came back.

I installed a program called RealTemp 3.70 which told me that temperatures were running at about 49 dec C with a MAx of anyting up to 58 for each of the cores. (I also tried it on my laptop and the temps were much lower, particularly the max.

This morning I took the cover of the tower and spent a bit of time cleaning out the processor heat sink, which had a lot of dust in it and the temps have dropped to the 30-39 range, with a maximum of 39 (They vary across the cores). A brief test of WinTV reveals a perfect picture again.

Might I have solved the problem or am I barking up the wrong tree again?

Overheating was certainly the first thing that sprang to my mind - although those temps aren't that high for a standard PC. I would say there is a good chance you have found and fixed but only time will tell.

Well the max temp you can safely push is 80-85c without errors appearing the TJMAX is 95c which is when it can go PoP or BanG

so the temperatures you're getting now are fine and should cause no problem.

Thank you both for your replies. It is certainly steady as a rock now in WinTV and the temperatures have not changed.

I did not think they were too bad before, so maybe the software while giving me a consistent value, is not reporting an accurate one, or maybe the machine is just getting old.