Sounds like you might need to look at the fan. Cleaning the fan will make it more efficient, and you can do a reasonable job of that without opening the machine. Just be careful to suck the crud out, not blow it in. A vacuum snorkel might be Ok if you held it away from the machine a bit to reduce the pull. I use the "brush" attachment and don't press it against the grill. If it's really dirty, a damp cloth to clean the bunnies off the grill will work wonders. I think Poser is drive intensive on older machines, because it hammers the virtual memory (a swap file) mercilessly. That could be why Poser is heating up the drive. No cheap fix for that. As for RAID, be wary. I had a new computer RAIDed and learned within a few days that some software (fortunately the culprit was a game, but the principle remains) regards the "copy" as illegal. So it's difficult to install and likely to refuse to run. And once you've got a RAID setup, apparently it's not easy to get rid of. I asked a techie at Best Buy if there was a program that would uninstall or modify a RAID system. "FDisk?" Oh well. M