Today's 'Question Everything' is - "When is the last time you popped the side cover off your computer tower, and vacuumed out the dust from the fans and the boards inside it?"
There are kits of miniature vacuum tools designed for this job, and they are very handy when you need to clean out the fins of a heat sink on a fan, for example. I got one a couple of years ago at a vacuum cleaner repair shop, and it is very handy. It's also well worth it, compared to the cost of replacing a fried CPU, and while I'm on the subject, here's the software to monitor your computer.
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"When is the last time you popped the side cover off your computer tower"
ReplyDeleteActually that's interesting, because both side panels on mine are off. The three big fans have failed. I have new ones, we know what one does with jobs like this; they do it tomorrow :-)
Actually, I've read that a vacmume can cause some static, which is not good. A can of compressed air is much better and it gets all the schumtz out of the cpu cooling fins.
Hi, Tommy -
ReplyDeleteIs yours an Acer by any chance? I got a new one in 2008, and the fan for the CPU began making horrible noises within about 6 months. One weekend, because I couldn't get it into a shop just then, I took it off, cleaned it, and soaked it with 10W-40 motor oil. Then I wiped away most of that, and
put it back on. It's been working fine ever since, and I didn't need a new fan after all.
The problem, I think, was because that fan had a new kind of "hydraulic bearing" which likely had never been lubricated. Once it got some good oil, it ran OK.
You're right, though, about static.
When tinkering inside a PC, we should always be mindful of that,
and take precautions.