[W.]

My laptop started getting too warm, tried blowing it out, ended up disassembling it. Here's what i saw:

The fan pulls air from the slots in the case bottom and pushes it through the heat sink, then out the vents in the side. That was a year's worth of fuzzy buildup. I found a disassembly guide here for Toshiba, but they're all similar.

[PieterCasparzen]

Question about cleaning the vents. Isn’t the method you suggest simply blowing the dust deeper into the laptop?

I know I need to clean my vents but really don’t know my options besides for a can of air.

(W.).... I found a disassembly guide here for Toshiba, but they're all similar.

Every few years, do that complete disassembly/clean, I concur. You'll need isopropyl (very pure) alcohol and few other things - as W says, use the guide for your machine which today you can usually find online quickly. It's generally a bit of blowing, followed by wiping and detailed cleaning. Not that difficult when all is disassembled; just have to be careful not to break or lose parts, like a surgeon.

My experience with the dust though was a complete system crash with no message or log, as the system board was short-circuiting across components. After the cleaning, no probs.

For the cpu-100% problem, you've got a runaway program running, as I said elsewhere, probably your browser rendering a nasty webpage, or some malware.

I found sites that were linking to ad servers which made the sites behave very badly when I would not let them store cookies.

[csvset]

Saw this video from Sandia Lab's YouTube channel.

Sandia Cooler

The Sandia Cooler is 30-times more efficient than conventional air-cooled heat exchangers and is available for licensing to electronics and solid state lighting cooling manufacturers.