I posted in another thread that my PC was reaching unreal highs of ~50 C (±). This was kinda explainable, if the temperature inside the room matched the temperature outside (nearly 41C). However, I ignored this as I have been running my PC almost continuously. It was making a lot of noise as well. I started playing crisis and it keeps crashing, screwing up the video drivers. This is odd as I could play it at above medium settings, with 4 AA @1280 *768 (i think) resolution. But now, even at medium settings and no AA, it just crashes after some 15 mins or less of gameplay. In these 15 mins, the temperature shoots up like hell (which I deduce causes the crash) and the entire system becomes unstable.

Normally, I would associate this to some hardware related issue, but since yesterday, I notice that while I'm in linux, the avg temperature barely crosses 42- 43 C. Agreed that not as many processes run in Linux, but I have it severely customised for a lot of stuff.

Anyone has any idea what's wrong> is my Windows somewhat corrupted? Just a side note: I tried installing Vista, but it wouldnt.  It would not procede beyond Loading System Drivers...

Just as a precaution, I'm downloading XP64 to verify if something is wrong with my windows or my hardware.

Also, one more thing... my CPU fan makes a whirrrrrrrrrrrrr noise when the temperature rises too much... like a paper is stuck or something. I cleaned everything, yet it does. So apart from the obvious irritation from that noise, it no biggie rt? Never came across this.