Got a (slightly) interesting story about the heat resistance of Celerons.
A friend of mine had an old 666MHz Celeron box (it was an HP Pavilion, I think) and he took it into PC World to have a DVD drive fitted. After taking it back a total of three times, he finally got a DVD drive fitted, the drivers installed, and his own copy of the drivers should the OS ever need reinstalling (every other week; it was WinME).
Six months later, we're wondering why it seems to be crashing so often even with a clean, five-minute-old WinME installation. We take the case off and discover that the middle connector on the DVD drive's ATA cable is jammed at an angle directly between the CPU fan and the power supply. So much of an angle, in fact, that it is actually stopping the fan from turning.
The heatsink on this CPU was one of those tiny 1cm thick ones with lots of metal and very little surface area. Without the fan, the CPU could probably boil cup of water very quickly. When we unscrewed the fan, we found that it had been pushed completely out of position by the ATA connector and would no longer turn without fouling its own mountings.
Another piece of usable hardware completely destroyed by PC World. I swear, if I ever go into that shop for anything other than a specific component I've already selected and intend to install myself, please shoot me.
The CPU was fine. We stuck a spare Athlon 1700 cooler on it and the system was very stable (as far as any system running Windows ME can be considered stable). As far as I know, that Celeron is still working perfectly despite having operated for six months at temperatures in excess of 100°C. Maybe its speed rating has something to do with that...
