Cleaning your PC

Hi marck,

The frequency that one should clean the inside of a PC depends upon the environment the PC is maintained in. I have a few suggestions that make the cleaning better.

Before spraying can air into the PC to blow the dust away, vacuum the majority of the dust away. This prevents the same dust from recollecting in the PC and lessens the side effects that can air can cause. A lot of dust means longer sprays from the can air which is compressed. Longer sprays gives less time for the compressed air to adjust to room temp (this is why the can starts to feel cold after using it heavily). The colder air is not good for the components causing shrinking metal (at connections) and even condensation (moisture and electronic is never a good mix). Also when trying to blow out a lot of dust it causes dust particles to embed in connections (such as the connections that the RAM strips fit into the motherboard). This increases with longer sprays where the colder air cause the connectors to shrink and provide a bigger gap in the connection. I have seen such long sprays cause the RAM to lose connection and the PC fail to boot. After cleaning the RAM connections the PC would boot OK...caused by the long spray of can air.

I use my household upright vacuum cleaner that has an crevice tool attachment. The crevice attachment is the long flat tube with the slanted tip that when placed on the attachment hose decreases the intake hole which increases the suction power of the vacuum. I insert into the opening of the crevice tool a plastic soda straw (the ones that bend are best) and use duck tape to hold the straw in place and cover the rest of the crevice tool opening. This creates a long, small, bendable, and non conductive plastic tube that has awesome suction power and can fit in extremely small places such as fan blades and cooling fins. Once I have given the PC a good vacuuming I then use can air. The amount of dust left after vacuuming is small enough to be blown out with a few short bursts, thus avoiding the problems that could arise from long bursts of can air.

The key area to remove dust is the cooling fins for processors and the blades of all cooling fans. Don't forget both sets of fans at the front and back of your power supply. If you use a graphic card, remember that it too has cooling fins and a fan that needs cleaning.

Reminding yourself to clean ever so often is easy. If you use any king of scheduling or calendar program such as Outlook you can schedule it to remind you. If you don't have any such program it still is easy to to.... Write a document (Word, WordPad, or Notepad) and save as a file. Use Window's Scheduler to run the file at a set date. When the date arrives the file will run (open) and display your reminder.

There's an even better answer than a crevice tool and duct tape. Most appliance stores that sell vacuum cleaners, and some that sell other stuff (like sewing stores or even flea markets) sell kits of bitsy plastic tools that include among other things crevice tools, mini brushes, and narrowing adapters to allow them to be fitted onto the extension tool hose and tubes that come with every vacuum. Had mine for donkey's years and on the (far too limited) occasions when I've used them, they have worked a treat. And thinks to Dr, Mark for the caveats re getting too ambitious with the compressed air!