Probably should have responded earlier, if only to avoid paranoia about potential shenanigans. It's all related to the broken 404ed sticky.
Shortly before the neco-bump, I stumbled across an old post over on /operate/ discussing a potential fix for another 404 issue. What the hell, I figured, and necro-bumped a thread from page 10 to force a rebuild of the entire board. Didn't work, no surprise, as the post on operate was discussing how to fix an entire board that went 404, not a single 404ed sticky thread.
Whatever. The sticky thread is fixed now in spite of (not because of) my fooling about.
My only addition to the thread topic is an honorable mention for Raspberry PIs. I regularly leave three of my PIs running in an unconditioned room at the height of daytime summer conditions (37'c+). I forgot to shut them down one day when it topped 41'c for several hours. No problems at all. Granted you don't want to try that with a live, expensive, gaming rig. However, a lightly stressed remote file/wiki/security monitor/etc. server is perfect for the plethora of fanless SOC based technologies these days. And, you can save a ton on electricity costs and support infrastructure.
Aside from fan failures being more common, shitty heat dissipation characteristics are par for the course for most laptops. I've never had a laptop flat out die from overheating, but I do have them go wonky during normal operation all the time from it. Even in an air-conditioned room. Now I always use a chiller pad, and listen to colleges bitch about how unstable fucking windows is for some strange reason in between asking why the meeting room is a little warmer today. Queue up: "Why is your laptop the only one working?" and "Isn't that the laptop the VP of marketing upgraded from because it kept overheating?" When pressed, I just claim it's because I'm using Linux. Very few of them make the connection to the stupid looking nerdy little fan pad sitting underneath.