My CPU Fan Really Sucked

I was digging around inside of Samus the other day. Mostly I was trying to hook up an IDE disk so I could reset the root password on the drive, but I happened top notice that there was a huge dust buildup on the CPU’s heatsink and fan combo. Since everything was shut down already, I removed the fan and vacuumed out all the crap.

That’s when I discovered that the heatsink fan was on backwards. Instead of sucking air up from the heatsink and blowing it away from the motherboard, it was sucking air from inside the case and pushing it down towards the CPU. Now, I’m not thermal fluid expert, but that just didn’t seem to be right, so I flipped it over.

The idle CPU temperature has dropped from 59 C to 53 C. Now I wonder how it will behave if I put the case cover back on. Will my evil machine check exception go away?