As title suggests, I'm looking to resolve a few unrelated problems soon, and was hoping to get some advice.
Before anything else, I'll provide a Speccy report here:
The issues are:
1. I believe my CPU / Motherboard is overheating. My computer abruptly turns off randomly maybe twice a month, and Speccy will generally show 75-90c temps for both CPU and Motherboard sometimes, generally when gaming or watching video. My initial thought is that I need to redo the Thermal Paste, because the last time I removed the dust from the heatsink, I didn't have any to use (I know that's really stupid, I wasn't aware that it needed to be replaced at the time.) I guess my question is if replacing the Thermal Paste is the obvious issue here, or if it could be something else? Is there anything I should know in regards to applying thermal paste, and should I just do that asap then check back if the problem persists?
2. As far as RAM goes, I'd like to move up to 16GB. I have never added RAM before but it seems fairly simple, but regardless, do you guys have any advice for me? Anything specific I need to look for? Is my current stick of RAM good to keep and I just need another stick of 8 or should I just get completely new stuff? I'm pretty clueless here, but yeah, let me know if I need to provide additional info at all.
3. As for VPN, really I'm just curious how many of you guys use VPN's, if you think it's important at all, and if you do, is there anything specific I should look for in the VPN providers? My family tends to use Kodi Amazon Fire Sticks constantly and I'm pretty sure they are just YOLO about it... so that's one reason I was considering getting a VPN sub (not sure if or how I can even apply it to said sticks but yeah.) Aside from that, if I do use it, do you guys know of any way to config a VPN so that when I play online games like Counter Strike, League of Legends, Path of Exile etc, that the VPN does NOT get used, but for everything else it does? Basically the idea that a VPN will negatively impact my connection speeds / ping / packet sizes etc is a massive downside for me while gaming, but at the same time, I can see benefits to using it for everything else.
Thanks for any replies!