One of the friends of my eldest daughter complained about her very slow computer some days ago. She said it was slower than her old PIII. She had a computer shop to modfy it to be more quiet.
So I asked her to bring the offending piece of hardware to us and looked at it: the Intel C2D 8200 was crunching along nicely ... @ 1 GHz!
I started looking around and at this temperature the CPU was @ 85ºC at that speed. Obviously the CPU protected itself by decreasing the clockfrequency
When I took the very nice Tuniq HSF I realised that the person who had assambled the computer had put the cooler onto the CPU with the protective plastic on the cooler - and between the cooler and the CPU.
The silver thermal paste was on the CPU and on the plastic. I pulled the plastic off, cleaned the CPU, put on new Arctic Silver 5, mounted the HSF, restareted the the computer, OC'ed it to 3.375GHz and it really took off. The girl was amazed at the speed. One piece of plastic ...