Thanks guys, I will probably get a cooling pad, and continue to monitor the temperature, although I'm not so worried about it now :)

I have this gimpy home-made cooling pad with one fan that sits directly below where the fan (if it worked) would take in air. I'm just wondering if this is enough, or if I need to bring out the "big...

I would say Dell. I've been considering their new Vostro. If you're willing to settle for a used one, Dell Latitudes run around $400-$500 on ebay, and the Latitudes are one of the best. Don't go for...

Copy any files that are important off of it and format the flash drive. If that doesn't solve the problem, I would say return them to the store.

and here's something I found online that might be useful to read:

If your CD/DVD drive disappeared from My Computer but you still can see it in the device manager, you can use this method posted...

Try nero. I've used it for a while now and my parents use it and we've never made any "coasters" before. You should just be able to burn an audio disk with nero - we can with the version we have.

first try getting a new driver - the old copy may have been corrupted.
Secondly, you could try cleaning the CD drive (very carefully and look at tutorials if you've never done it before)

I have one very dead fan in my computer, which is why I have an external one that keeps the machine cool. I also have SpeedFan, which measures the temperatures of both the harddrive and the CPU. I'm...