Amilo Xi 1546: overheating issues, please advise!

Hi guys,

I've had this Amilo Xi 1546 (T7200 @2GHz, 1Gb, Mobility Radeon X1800, running XP SP2) since mid May 2006. It's been a great system so far, though I've always noticed it ran kinda hot.

However, recently I've been unable to play games at all. I'm not a major gamer, I'll occasionally stick on something like Medieval 2: Total War or Half Life 2 for a couple of hours, but that's it. However, I use my laptop for work as well as home, so it does get heavy usage, and I've definitely noticed that it runs a lot hotter these days than it used to. It's loud, too - the fan seems to be on constantly.

I downloaded Speedfan to get some temperature diagnostics and was rather worried at the results, with only Firefox and a couple of other open apps...

HD0: 53C
Temp1: 84C
Core 0: 59C
Core 1: 59C

EIGHTY FOUR DEGREES ON IDLE?! Speedfan gives that as the ACPI temperature... I thought ACPI was just a specification for your PC to control fan speeds according to temperature, so I don't even know whether that's accurate. All I know is that the laptop runs hot.

I tried running HL2 earlier today, a game that I've had installed for a few months and has always run perfectly well before (last time I played it would have been September/October '06). Now I get fairly major artifacts after only about 30 seconds of play (having not even picked up a weapon or seen anything graphically intensive), before the GPU crashes. Same thing with Medieval 2 - even the campaign map is too much for it. The worrying thing about M2 crashes is that it just hangs, then the monitor slowly fades out. I have to hold down the power button to switch it off. But if I try to switch it back on, it lights up for a second before dying again. First time that happened I almost browned my pants, but luckily leaving it for 5 minutes to cool down allows it to boot up again.

What do you guys advise? I don't trust myself to open up the PC and clean it myself. I'm pretty technically minded but far better with software than I am with toying around with hardware... should I take it to a repair shop and get them to clean it, or is this a major issue that I should take up with Fujitsu Siemens? It's still under warranty, and I'd rather do that than pay hundreds of pounds just for someone to spray some canned air around the insides and reapply some thermal paste. Problem is, since it is a work PC, I need it every day, so sending it away for a month for F-S to fix it isn't really much of an option.

I'm pretty worried about it, as it was a very expensive machine when I bought it, and it really should last more than 9 months without getting to the point where it's running so hot it's threatening to crash after a minute of doing anything more intensive than just running Windows. I've got a bad feeling something's going to fry soon, I'm doing daily backups of documents and emails just in case...