We take our computers for granted. We turn them on and they work (well, if we haven’t gotten tangled up in adware, viruses or Windows decides to misbehave <grin>).
As we do our Spring cleaning (that’s Fall cleaning for those of you in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and other points south of the Equator), we do some of the major cleaning jobs around our homes. And, inside our homes…
But, who thinks of about cleaning the PC?
This time, I’m not talking about cleaning our computers from adware, spyware, viruses, deleting old files we no longer need (You buy a new hard drive so you can store more, right? I do!). I’m talking about real cleaning.
PC’s get dirty in their insides, too. We use cooling fans to blow air through our computers. Most computers have heatsinks with cooling fans on the CPU. Some even have heat sinks with fans on the video cards, too. The hot new video cards are not only "hot" from a demand point of view, they are hot temperature-wise also.
Depending on your PC’s design, you might have only a power supply fan that blows out of the case, where the case is designed to bring the cooling air in from the front. Or, you might have fans blowing in and fans blowing out, in order to increase the air flow.
You might have some of the new 120mm fans, which spin more slowly to reduce noise while moving the same amount of air as 80mm fans.
However you system is designed, it pulls in air for cooling and then blows it out.
And, along with that air comes dust. Even in a clean house, you have dust that will enter your computer and interfere with its cooling. If your computer is in a dusty environment, say a computer in a mechanical shop, you’ll get even more dust into it.
For our cleaning process, we have two major steps:
- Unplug the case and open it up
- Using a can of compressed air (available at your local computer shop or office supply store), blow the dust out of the computer
Pay close attention to the heat sink on the CPU. It has a tendency to actually plug with dust. You might find that out the hard way. Today’s computers watch the CPU’s temperature and have thermal cutoffs — if the CPU gets too hot, the computer will shut down without warning!
While this may protect the expensive CPU from permanent damage, it does little for your blood pressure as you lose your work (or the game you were playing!).
Don’t forget to blow the dust out of the power supply, too. You might even want to take the computer outside to blow it out.
Do not use vacuum cleaners or brushes, though. Just use a can of compressed air. Electronic components on the motherboard and cards, including but not limited to memory and the CPU, can be damaged by static electricity if you use brushes, dusting rags, or even vacuum cleaners.
and
I’d like to add some tips to computer housecleaning.
Use a pencil, drinking straw, or some other stick-like item to keep the fan your blowing out from spinning too fast while the air is blow forcefully at the fan blades. The reason for this is to prevent the bushings from being damaged by the high force of the compressed air.
You can actually use brushes on computer components. These brushes have hollow metal handles and the bristles are made from pig hair. They are sold in hardware stores as flux or glue brushes. Way, way back in my ancient technician an PCB assembler days, we used to use the same brushes to clear away old dirt and dust, and never lost a component to this. So, while blowing the air out, brush the heat sink carefully loosen up the dust if it is really caked on using this kind of brush. They’re pretty cheap – I think they go for about 50-cent or less each.
You might want to also take the front cover off, if you can, and clean in there. You wouldn’t believe how much dust and dirt can collect inside the front. On some machine cases, the covers are held on by plastic grommets that you can push the cover off. Others have screws, and are held on by a clip that holds the top of the case on. It all depends upon who makes the case.
Make sure too that while you’re cleaning to get in and around the wires. I find that wire harnesses really hold on to dust bunnies very well and really can clog up the airflow badly. I’ve used this clean-up opportunity to reroute wires. You can do that too if you’re not to afraid to mess up anything. It’s pretty easy though. I’ve actually made little tags to mark wires before I’ve pulled them out so I would remember where they went in.
In the not-so-distant past, I’ve had users bring their home machines to me where I work. The users complained of poor performance and crashing. Some machines were so dusty that I swear I could have stuffed a couch with the dirt. One machine even had a bug inside. I guess you can say this machine had a computer bug!
John