Much as I hate to, I guess I could try that.

Have you tweaked it a whole lot? If not, uninstall/reinstall should be pretty painless.

That seemed to clear up the Yahoo problem. I did notice one thing, the damn Shop to Win crap that CoreTemp installed was on Chrome as an extension again when I re-installed Chrome, which is odd because I thought I got rid of it through MalwareBytes and Spybot, though I may have forgotten to delete the last remnant from Chrome. Thanks again man.

No worries. Glad you got that crap sorted out. So, other than these minor speed bumps, how's the rig performing for you?

Well, other than my test with The Witcher 2 I haven't really played anything yet. I had to redownload all of my GOG games and that took quite awhile, lol. I'm having trouble deciding between playing Carmageddon and Thief to be honest, but I think i'm gonna go with Carmageddon before starting on the longer Thief series.

I am wondering about my CPU temps again, they seem to be a few degrees hotter, though that could be because it's warm tonight (current temp 63 F according to local weather) and I don't have my air conditioning on at the moment.

Sorry I missed it in later messages, but was this a false alarm? Because, I think CoreTemp is supposed to be a rather well-known CPU temp check utility, I'm using it too (and I haven't noticed anything so far, and no it did not change my homepage to Yahoo in either IE8, Firefox nor Opera).

Maybe I'll run Malwarebytes also, but I would be surprised if CoreTemp would be the culprit. Like most Windows freeware programs, it offers to install some optional toolbars etc., but I just declined them (and I don't think they are actual malware either).

I tried to google for core temp malware, came up with some discussions how certain virus scanners have marked core temp as trojan, but apparently those were false alarms. But I guess you can never know for sure...

Regarding CPU temperatures: just yesterday I actually opened up my work laptop (Thinkpad T400, took out the keyboard) and dusted it off inside with can air.

It is just that during last few weeks I noticed that when I was playing Baldur's Gate, the game would start stuttering sometimes. With Core Temp, I noticed that BG seems to always cause a constant 100% load to one CPU core, causing it to heat up. This happens even, or especially, in BG menus etc. Some stupid programming in the Infinity engine games. I googled for it, and apparently those games use 100% one-core CPU load, no matter how fast your PC is?

Anyways, the stuttering was apparently due to overheating, the core temp went sometimes well over 90 Celsius degrees with Baldur's Gate. I think the highest core temp I saw was maybe 97 C. After dusting a bit, now the temp stays under 80 all the time with BG, no stutter anymore. "Idle" temp, for example right now, is around 41 Celsius.

What the heck is wrong with those Infinity engine games? I don't think even 3D games like Halo 1-2 make this laptop as hot.

Why are you wondering? According to that list, the temperatures stay well below 40 Celsius (I presume that is idle), which to me sounds quite cool for CPU core temps.

As said, my "idle" CPU temp is currently around 41 C, and I feel it is quite fine (runs quiet and feels cool, and I don't feel the fans pushing out hot air like they do when this is under stress, like when playing BG), This is a laptop, though, I guess it may run a bit hotter than desktops with gigantic fans.

Did you download Core Temp from it's homepage at http://www.alcpu.com/CoreTemp/ ? If so, did you press the big Download: Core Temp 1.0 RC3 because that will be your problem (and it's actually stated on the page and how to remove it via a link under that big download link)

That link uses InstallIQ (which is adware) to install Core Temp. More information can be found HERE (taken from the Core Temp homepage)

Core Temp is SAFE as I've been using it since 1.0 RC2 (about a year or more) and I regularly run malware and virus scans and have security software installed and I've never had any problems

If you want to use it (I recommend it), click More downloads which is located under that big download link I previously talked about and you'll be able to download the standalone version for 64bit

I hope this helps :)

EDIT: a word was spelt wrong

Sheesh, that's pretty stupid! Somehow I downloaded the clean version, fortunately.

This seems to be the trend increasingly with Windows freeware/shareware. To pay the authors bills, both their homepages and the installers have all kinds of tricks trying to lure you into installing crap to your machine. Core Temp (even the clean version) asks you for some toolbars too, but at least it asked. Same for e.g. PeaZip.

But I guess that's the price you have to pay for useful freeware, at least on the Windows platform.

SpeedFan 4.44 helps me.

Re: "Why does Baldur's Gate always cause 100% CPU load?"... Actually on ASUS G75 that doesn't seen to be true anymore. It runs at around 50%, and cooler too than on the T400 (core temp staying below 60 Celsius all the time; below 80 C on the T400).

The funny thing is though, on it it seems to stay pretty much around 50% all the time, as if it was locked there.

Well, I guess I found it a bit odd that one of the cores was running at a little bit of a higher temp than the others.
Yep, that's what my dumbass installed.
I heard about that awhile back, but I don't think that happened to me with the Infinity Engine games on my old PC. Hopefully that's not the case with my new one.