Help: Possible Hardware Failure

[vulcanlogician]

So, in order to cover all my bases, I decided to open up my computer and blow it out with canned air. So I did that. I noticed a bit of dust around my cpu fan and heat sink, so I spent some extra time blowing it out.

Now the CPU fan is loud as fuck. It's like Pavarotti. I guess I blew dust "into" some part of it that I shouldn't have or something. Now I am considering taking the fan and heat sink off and cleaning off the processor. IDK.

edit: So a couple of bumps quieted the fan down. I suppose there was dust in there or something.

I've had a fan whose bearings wore out and it made a lot of noise until it died one day.  A fan can be replaced pretty easily if that's the problem.

I would love for that to be the case, but there's my computer restarting, crashing, and the monitor flickering off that has me suspecting hardware failure.

Thanks for your help on this, SB. I truly am clueless on this stuff as you probably already gathered. 

I haven't downloaded any of the heat detection stuff or anything yet. TBH it looks like I'll need to watch videos just to learn how to use the stuff. I've decided to get the external drive first because if the power supply fails, then I can just replace it. If the hard drive fails, I lost some shit.

It wasn't, like, super dusty in my computer. I was kinda hoping it was dust because, that's the cheapest one to fix.