Need help in diagnosing what in hardware is the problem

[googling999]

Hi,

I have a Dell XPS L502x laptop, which is around 6 years old but only mildly or moderately used. For the past 1 year, it started getting slow, so I replaced the HDD with Samsung 850 Evo SSD and reinstalled the windows 7 operating system. But, it was of no use.

The problem is, even without any programs installed, the fan keeps on running, and there is some heat (not too high). The maximum CPU frequency in "Resource Monitor" is always high, more than 100% even for very small programs. Windows performance index rates very low on "Graphics: Desktop performance for Windows Aero" is very low, 3.9/10.

I suspect this all started when I opened my laptop fully to clean and fiddled something with the fan and heat-sink. Can you please help me what the problem could be, Is it the fan/hat-sink/processor ?

Thank you so much,
Ben

 

[Math Geek]

the age of the pc suggests that it could use fresh thermal paste. more than likely the cleaning you did broke up the dried out paste under the heat sink and it's not working up to par now.

i'd start there with replacing the paste and as you put it back together be sure to check all the parts to be sure they are connected right. should make a big difference.