fanless via EPIA-M 600 overheating

[grandpa_boris]

i've had my fanless epia-M systems for a couple of years now. in the last few days, i've started having problems with one of them. this box is running win2k (patched to the latest sp4 level).

it seems that periodically the CPU on the otherwise idle system gets driven up above 90'C and the system hard-hangs. because the system is idle for a while by that point, inevitably the screen saver already had shut off the screen. so i can't see the status of anything on the screen, including the CPU temperature monitor. i am forced to reset the box, which is very hot to touch (and probably has been in that state for hours). as soon as the system has rebooted, i start the CPU temp monitor and usually see the CPU hovering above 85'C. over time, the temperatures drop to the "normal" 55'C.

i was suspecting that the temperature is being driven up by the regularly scheduled runs of norton antivirus, but NAV supposed to be running at 5 AM and i found the system in the hard-hanging state this afternoon...

but this is just the latest step in the slow degradation of this system. it used to sit under 60'C when running widnows media player and temperature monitor, with nothing else eating up CPU. now i am regularly seeing 70'C and the sytstem monitor shows the CPU 70% idle, without any suspicious CPU activity.

i have taken apart the box, to see if there is dust buildup or something else is obstructing cooling, but found nothing extraordinary. if this was due to the EPIA's integrated heatsink loosening or the thermal grease decaying, then the overall temperature of the system shouldn't be increasing, just the CPU should be getting hot, right? but i am finding the top of the case nearly painful to touch, as opposed to the "normal" state, when the CPU is around 70'C and box is very warm, but not hot.

also, through all this, the system's disk drive is hovering under 45'C, so it's not the heat rising from the disk driving the CPU over the edge.

does this sound at all familiar to anyone? i know other people here have fanless VIA boxes. is this something pathological happening on my system because windows is doing something bad? is the EPIA M CPU going bad? any other theories?

right now i am considering taking my 2nd EPIA box and installing windows on that (it's currently running linux -- and spends most of its time in deep hybernation and has no problems at all) or building a completely new fanless system to replace the overheating EPIA.