Upgrade to Ubuntu 12.04

Took the plunge yesterday and upgraded my 10.04 LTS to 12.04. This Unity thing was holding me from upgrade last year with all those negative comments. At the moment, I am lost actually - where are the menus and stuff! May be I'll get used to it after a while.
Some Observations:
1. Laptop is running cooler - they seemed to patch a power management issue was hogging for long time.
2. Upgrade was smooth and all programs seem to be intact. Usually I had to spend atleast a day to fix all the issues after an upgrade - searching the net for issues and finding solutions.
3. Not all applications are Unity compatible, leaving a mixed bag. Therefore the windowing experience is confusing and inconsistent. e.g. Firefox and chrome.
4. I expected to get new versions of applications with 12.04, but did not. e.g. Gimp is still 2.6.
5. Meanwhile, while typing this post, I closed the browser at least three times, while trying to open the menu from top left corner. Thanks to Chrome, I got the windows back, along with the unsaved blogger post!

Laptop running hot? Fans might be clogged!

Just yesterday, my sister left her old laptop with me to have it re-formatted. It was terribly slow and I didn't see any improvement even after restoring to factory state. Now, I had hated this restore thingy, which copies the image from a hidden partition to C drive. But this time, it was god send, and the restore took hardly 15 mins. When I checked the CPU temperature (using an utility called SpeedFan), it was hovering around 75degC. I knew it was high and could feel the fan running at high speed all the time.

Now, this is an 8 year old laptop and I thought the fans and heat sink could be clogged, though I could not see any dust when looking through the sides. Searched for disassembly videos on youtube and luckily got one. Finally reached the fan assembly and saw this:

Took apart the fan assembly, removed the fan from the housing, cleaned up the fan/fins using a small brush. It was not easy. Wish I had compressed air can.

Assembled the whole thing back, booted up and after running a while with all browsers with flash pages, ran the Speedfan again. This time the CPU temp showed 65deg C. That's a lot of improvement. The PC seems to run better, though not to my expectations. But the fan speed seem to be normal.