SamuelRSmith on 14 October 2012
While I do not know the specifics, it is entirely possible for software to cause hardware to damage. Glitches in driver software may force a component to work too hard and overheat, thus causing your fan to go OTT.
You may have updated a driver which had a glitch, causing a component to overheat, and that update you downloaded was a fix for the glitch. Although this seems unlikely, as the turn around on the bug fix sounds like it was remarkably quick... and software never releases that fast (most firms have rigorous release strategies).
