HP M8300F Desktop - Heatsink

Ok, i bought a HP M8300F DT 4 years ago.
Well today i noticed with speccy mycpu temperature was jumpin 110-120-135-141-130-138 ect. i took the heat sink and fan off, clean them, but still the same thing. i noticed the thermal paste was a really dark grey and mostly dried up, i wiped the clumps off which actually took most of the thermal paste off, well my question is, is it a fan failure or bad thermal paste thats making it get so hot, i had windows 7 32bit then went to 64 and it was 140 degrees, then went back to xp and still 138, i just shut it off, not tryin to melt the processor. normal temperatures are usually 110-115 or 90-100 sitting.

is it a failing fan or do i just need new thermal paste or what? and i noticed my ram used to be dual channel, now its single for some reaso. im fearing it be something more than a 5 dollar bottle of paste thats wrong with my comp.

im afraid to turn my computer back on with no thermal paste between processor and heatsink. so i guess i will wait and get some responses before i even mess with it agian.

AMD Althon 64 x2 6000+ processor @ 3.00 GHZ
4GB DDR 2 Ram
Nvidia Gforce 9400GT 1gb

thanks to any advice

well after checking online, i can run my heatsink without thermal paste, and i did, well, its 130-135 sittin with nothing installed driver or software wise in xp. so i dont think its just a thermal paste issue anymore.

any ideas to what i can do.

all my tempature are in farenhiet because i dont like celcus, and my friend is givin me a lil thermal paste to try some new paste since my old paste is 4 years old. i just recently been upgrading my desktop in the last year or so so im hoping the new thermal paste will help keep my dt cooler.

well the thermal paste did the trick, back to normal, i guess carrying this desktop around alot had broken the seal between heatsink and processor.

I have a HP m8300f desktop computer, the motherboard is a HT2000 type MCP61PM-HM rev. This is a writing on it and send 791 LF820 (company code looks like) a small metal cap blue logo. I was told it could be 820uf, but I do not know the voltage! They are next to the upper limit as 6.3 V witch is the same?