Story with a lesson

[stiz]

well for the last couple weeks my pc has been running really slow, 10 mins to boot, hung whilst trying to load anything etc. Yesterday it got really bad, 20 mins to boot from cold ... after useing pcs for several years i naturally suspected it was a virus or something similer, so scaned etc, came back clean. So then i thought it was something i'd installed or not uninstalled properly, uninstalled a load of stuff, did reg scans etc and whilst they helped a bit, didnt solve it.

Then i decided to open it up and look for any loose wires, componments that might have got knock as this pcs been moved around quite a bit. So took the side off ... and found something that scared the liveing crap outa me .... the main fan on the CPU wasnt on properly and covered with dust to boot! Took the fan off, gave it a good clean ... noticed there wasnt any of that gel stuff you put on the cpu (which is now on order!), put the fan back on, and hey presto .... pcs working fine

So lesson of the day ... clean the pc regulary

 

[kilo delta]

Yep....think of PC's as being constantly running vacuum cleaners. To limit the dust being ingested many cases come with filters on the intake fans. If yours doesn't come with these filters then MacGyver one up out of a pair of old tights (pantyhose) or such like.

 

[Toastmaker]

Good tip there - thanks for the lesson!

 

[paiken]

Living in a 60 year old house in the desert with two cats and a dog, I make it a point to clean out the gizzards of my box every two or three months. It's truly astounding how much fur finds its way into my computer. I get some pretty bodacious dust bunnies in there.

 

[Tako_Kichi]

Yep....think of PC's as being constantly running vacuum cleaners. To limit the dust being ingested many cases come with filters on the intake fans. If yours doesn't come with these filters then MacGyver one up out of a pair of old tights (pantyhose) or such like.

My case has a door on the front made from punched metal (a metal sheet with small holes punched all over it like a speaker grille) with a plastic inner face and has a circular hole that aligns with a fan mounted on the inner front face of the tower. To stop it ingesting dust and the hair from our two cats and puppy I tape a used fabric softener sheet to the inside of the door over the hole. I set up a reminder on my calendar software to remind me to change the filter every two weeks and it's amazing just how much fine crud and dust it collects in that short space of time.

I have been doing this since I got the new tower and my internal heatsinks and fans have stayed much cleaner and everything runs much cooler. Just make sure you use a fabric softener sheet that has been through the clothes drier otherwise you will end up with an oily deposit over everything. I now have my wife trained to save the sheets into a ziplock bag when she takes the laundry out of the drier so that I always have a supply of filters for my tower.