I'm pretty sure I know what's wrong now but I guess I'll bounce the idea off you guys.

Recently, my computer shuts itself down. Sometimes it beeps, sometimes it doesn't. What will happen is it will just shut itself down - at the most inconvienent times. And not restart - shut down.

My mom and bother have not been having the problem but it would go 5 times in a row for me until I just gave up. It happened again tonight so I left it for about an hour.

So something occured to me. A few months ago, the fan was making really weird noises. Now, it's quiet. Infact I put my hand back there and the reason it's quiet is because I don't think it's spinning at all! Very little hot air coming out the back!!

So what I'm thinking is it shuts itself down as a safty thing to prevent massive overheating. I get it the most because I'm usually doing so much at once.

My plan is to get one of those little compressed air things to blow the dust out of the fan and if that doesn't work, simply install a new fan.

(At first I thought it was just WindowsME being...well...WindowsME. But I think overheating is the issue.)

thoughts? comments? condolences?