FyreTech

That seems a bit high. If the microprocessor is under 100% load, it should be fine, but if this is happening at let's say 50% load, consider a better cooler or try reapplying TIM. (Don't think reapplying will do much in your case though.)

I have had good experience with them. Only thing I would complain about would be the moderately loud seek sound of the R/W heads on certain hitachi models. Not sure about the noise level of the new drives though.

This is a pretty common problem. This error generally happens when the graphics card "times out" from heat/very low framerate/corrupt drivers and recovers itself. Since the "timeout and recovery" and nvidia driver error screen are vague, there could be a lot of different causes for this, such as heat, bad memory, bad power supply, etc. What is your power supply max output rating? If it's too low, the PSU could be struggling with the card. There could be other problems with the PSU, but I can't know for sure. Next, try different memory, or test each one at a time to see if that fixes the issue. (I don't think this is the issue.), if you really wanted to, you could also run memtest86 on the memory for 5 passes or more. Next, it could be a problem with the card itself or corrupt drivers. You should try to fully uninstall the driver by entering device manager and uninstalling the device by opening the tab "display adapter" and right clicking on the device shown. Then select uninstall. If it's a problem with the card, then you should try a new card and see it its driver/hardware begins to "timeout". I would try a reinstall of the driver first, then check the other components. If it's heat, I'm sorry to say that a new card almost always solves the problem. If you're advanced enough, you could take apart the heat sink and fan assembly and reapply TIM over the GPU, but I don't really recommend this. Cheers!

Use Intel Quicksync if you're looking for performance. The quality will be a bit worse. Use x264 if you want good stream quality but likely worse performance. If you had an nvidia for AMD discrete graphics chip you would get the advantage of GPU encoding (well, for local recordings anyway.) Well, I would lean towards Quicksync or a better computer.

I would go 2x4gb instead of 1x8gb for memory. Pretty much every modern microprocessor prefers dual channel over single channel nowadays. You will see a small performance increase from dual channel as well.

Never mind, just saw your message. Glad your computer is running again!

Another thing you could try would be reflashing the bios. I would only do this as a last resort though. If something goes wrong while the bios is being written to the ROM/flash memory chip on the board, you would have gone through the trouble of reflashing for nothing. People usually say that if you lose power during flashing it's 'unrecoverable', but in reality most motherboards should have a key combination to tell the computer to look for a device attached containing BIOS files to rewrite to the memory again. I can't guarantee that your motherboard can do this though. Laptops almost always have this feature.

You should be fine. You are well within the safe temperature range. If it goes above 80C, you have a problem. Cheers.

This may be a bit late, but since you're saying that this is a netbook, the CMOS battery may be soldered onto the mainboard, or secured with a screw. If it's soldered, there should hopefully be two small metal contacts (jumpers) located near the battery labeled RTC or RST. (Sometimes these contacts are labeled CMOS or PWRD as well.) Touch both contacts with a conductive object at the same time for 30 seconds. I would use a flathead screwdriver for this. After that, simply turn on the laptop and hopefully the password is cleared. If this fails, I would say look for the password reset jumper, but I've never seen a laptop with that. Cheers.