Spring Cleaning

Usually when we hear the term ‘spring cleaning’ everyone thinks about their garage or storage area that has accumulated your yearly allotment of junk.  What I’d like you to think about at the moment is the inside of your computer.  How often do you think to remove the casing and see if the interior of your computer looks dusty?  I check about once a month and do regular cleanings about every 3 months depending on dust build up.  If your computer has been running the past couple of years without you checking the interior, then you’re no doubt in for a nasty surprise.  If you have allergies, did you know that regular cleaning of your computer will alleviate a lot of the sniffling and sneezing you suffer from whe you’re sitting at the computer?  When I got back from Iraq, my boss asked me to check his wife’s computer.  She said it was shutting down quite a bit when she was using several applications at one time.  What you may not know is that having multiple applications working at once causes the computer to work a bit harder.  This means that it produces more heat.  Now as I was sitting in front of her computer trying to get it to duplicate the problems she was having, I started smelling something funny.  Well, it wasn’t very funny, but it definitely smelled like something electrical burning.  Normally when I experience something of this nature it points straight to the power supply.  If you use a cheap power supply you can never tell when it’s going to fail and cause that awful stench in your house.  The problem here wasn’t the power supply in her Compaq computer, it was the dust.  The dust had become so prominent that it hung like moss from a tree….and it was on fire.  Yes friends, her computer caught on fire thanks to the dust that had collected there.   There was nothing I could do at that point to save it so I put it in the fire place very quickly while it finally extinguished itself.  Just last night I took another look in my case since I’ve had the side off for a week now while working with a few hard drive configurations.  It reminded me that by having the insides uncovered, I was simply allowing dust to freely enter my computer and layer my compenents.  This weekend I intend to give it a thorough dusting.  The best way to do this is unplug everything and then remove the exterior cover.  Take the computer outside on your porch and use an air duster to remove all of the particles.  Now some people absolutely freak out at this suggestion, but I also use a vacuum cleaner to pull dust out of my heat sinks and fans.  All  you need to do is keep the suction clear of the rest of the compenents to avoid potential damage.  This is a highly effective way to get rid of caked on dust that is embedded in the fan blads and the heatsink.  Make sure you’re holding the fan blades still with a finger though so that the suction can get everything without it spinning.

So this spring, do some cleaning and open that computer up to check it out.  You might just be appalled at what you find. Like my buddy who found the bottom of his case lined with dog hair since his dog would lay down beside the computer while the intake fan pulled in all of that pet hair and dander.

~ by jhurst747 on 17 April 2008.