Roughly one year ago my Dell Dimension 8200's graphics card started acting up. First there were strange sounds from the fan, and days later graphics started to act up and games froze and crashed.

I did everything customer support told me to do. I claimed it was hardware malfunction but customer support did not want to hear about that. I reinstalled windows, new drivers, old drivers, mem check software, ran diagnostics, I cleaned the fan - nothing helped. In this procedure the computer was often lying down open, instead of standing up as it should, and I noticed that when it was lying down there were no problems with the graphics when playing a game, but within five minutes from standing the computer up the problems started again.
This convinced customer support that it was indeed hardware failure and they sent me a new card - a month after the problems began.

The new card worked perfectly, until now. Roughly a year after the first card started to malfunction, I have started hearing the strained sounds from the fan. The graphics have yet to act up, but I recognise the symptoms. It is late spring, almost summer and both outside and indoor temperatures rise. Could this cause this problem? Is the fan too weak to cool the graphics card? I never heard of friends having this problem, I have never had this problem my self with other computers. The graphics card on my old Dell laptop, now 4 years old is still in mint condition, although they are known to become very warm when used over longer periods of time.

Has anyone else suffered the same problems?