I have a Dell C400 with Windows XP professional and 512 MB of RAM installed. I use it to play games a lot. Recently it had been overheating and shutting down on its own a lot, so I opened the casing to investigate the fan. Sure enough it was very dusty and there was a big dust curl clogging it. I cleaned it out, but the casing back together, and started the laptop up. Things were very slow to start up, so I figured I might have bumped my RAM card out of its seat and would have to reseat it. I looked in the system properties window, and there was still 512 MB of RAM, but my processor speed had gone from 1.5 GHz to 732 MHz. Obviously this could have been caused by me damaging the laptop when I opened the casing, but I was extremely careful when doing it, and think that it might be caused by something else. I hope so at least!

Does anyone have any suggestions for things I could try to resolve this issue? I would greatly appreciate it!