Fan slows computer?

[risingTide]

Greetings,

I have Dell Inspiron 8600 which seems to be in great shape except for one thing. After I use it for a certain amount of time a loud noise begins, which sounds like a fan, and slows down the processing. Before the fan starts the speed of the computer is normal, but then it gets incredibly slow. Also, if the more applications I run the faster the fan starts to run and slow things down.

Is this a fan? Is there anything I can do about this? It wasn't always like this; it just started doing it a few months ago.

Many thanks.

 

[strategic]

Normally on a laptop, you have different settings mainly to conserve battery power.
It becomes slow because you're probably running into the upper limit of your resources depending on what applications you're running. You have a good video card, but with XP SP3, you should have more memory than 1GB.

 

[risingTide]

Hmm...this laptop actually only has 256 mb of RAM.
So you think an upgrade would help?

Also, why would it just start doing this now when it was fine for years? It was even given a clean XP install about a year ago.

 

[strategic]

If your PC only has 256MB of RAM, an upgrade would definitely help.
I looked under your system specs and it showed 1GB.
Things change, over the years applications are more resource demanding.

 

[hhhh0530]

fans

power on the supply

 

[hhhh0530]

maybe to strong

 

[risingTide]

You mean the power supply may be too strong? How would I check that?