ugly way to keep your PC cleaner.

[aeromed202]

I was tinkering with ways to keep dust out of the case and came up with this. I shopped around to find a typical gauzy home air duct filter that had a minimum of filter material and had some sort of thin wire stiffening mesh bonded to the filter material too. Now here's the ugly part. I cut this to about one inch smaller than the entire removable side panel of my case, or the side where the air is drawn in from. I taped the filter to the panel around the perimeter while making sure the wire mesh held the body of the filter away from the panel surface about an inch or so. I figured that the increased resistance to the air flow generated by the case fans would be more or less negated by the large surface area of the filter through which the air would flow, meaning the un-filtered air volume pulled through per minute should not suffer due to the filters presence. I recorded the PC temps without the filter and with the filter and found no difference under normal use. I couldn't measure air volume moved but just feeling the fan output it feels the same as before. On my case there are two other small areas that also draw air and I might do those too but I've got 95% of the air supply filtered now. It's ugly for sure but after a two month check I had next to no dust inside the case when I opened it up. Depending on your particular case and fan power this may or may not work but it's very cheap to try.

 

[OBIO]

The case I purchased when I built my new system last February/March has built in pre-filters that stop a lot of the dust that would normally end up inside my system. The only weak link in the dust-prevention system is the two large areas in the main side cover that are pre-drilled for cooling fans.....80 to 140 mm. Those two areas do not have the pre-filter thingies. I need to come up with something to help filter the air getting into my case that way. Our place is DUSTY...the woman who lived her before us was a horrible house keeper..instead of doing house work to keep the place clean and fresh, she used a ton and a half of that scented carpet sprinkle stuff....and it gets into everything! I run the sweeper on Tuesdays and Fridays, and dust the entire house on those days.....and everytime I run the sweeper, the amount of the sprinkle crap the sweeper sucks up is just insane! I opened my system yesterday to blow it out, and I could taste that carpet sprinkle stuff as I cleaned it out of the fans, heat sinks, and off the boards in my system. Never use that carpet sprinkle stuff...it causes your carpets and rugs to wear out in a fraction of their normal life span and it simply turns your floors into dust factories.

OBIO

Oh...I once saw a guy who used fabric softener sheets as pre-filters for his systems. Not new fabric softener sheets, but after they had been run through the dryer with a load of clothing. They allowed air to flow freely, but did a wonderful job of pre-filtering the air before it went into the case. He said that new dryer sheets would cause the inside of your case to get an oily film on it...which would be a fire hazard and cause what dust did get inside to stick and be much harder to clean out.

 

[Tako_Kichi]

The case on my previous computer had a front 'door' with a perforated metal skin and in the front face of the case proper was a fan sucking air in. As this pulled all sorts of dust in to the case I used to tape USED fabric softener sheets inside the door to catch it. The sheets need to have been used in the clothes drier once to get all the fabric softening 'goop' out of them otherwise they can make a mess of the inside of your computer. I trained my wife to collect them in a zip-lock bag as she took clothes out of the drier so that I always had an available supply. I also set up a reminder on my computer calendar so that an alarm went off every two weeks to alert me of the fact that I needed to change the filter.

The drier sheets work very well as dust filters and cost nothing if you already use them for the laundry.