Cleaning your PC

How often do you take the lid off your PC and get the gunk out? David Dorn advises that a little cleanliness, aside from being next to Godliness, can also extend the life of your investment

I had occasion to be called out to an establishment last week, following a panic phone call telling me that 'the computer's dead'. Such a welter of technical information! However, with my very best ER manner, I hurtled towards said establishment to examine the patient and determine the cause of death before performing the miraculous resurrection that was obviously expected.

I was greeted by an anxious looking accounts department head, who, wringing her hands together, informed me that there was no way the wages run could be performed, since this machine was the one that did all the clever stuff with the bank over the phone lines.

I was ushered to the corpse, in front of which, almost miraculously, appeared a mug of steaming coffee - a pre-requisite for the proper process of sorting a dead machine out. Techies need the caffeine jolt to get the brains into gear, you know! Two sips later, and it was apparent that something was seriously amiss. The power light was lit. That threw the first main cause of PC death straight out of the window (in case you're wondering, it's either a lack of the power switch at the mains socket being in the 'on' position, or a lack of a lead between mains and PC). This might need The Tools!

First things first, though. Switch off the PC at its BRS (Big Red Switch), then wait ten seconds. Switch it back on. Wet a finger and hold it around the back, where the PSU fan ought to be gushing some air. Nothing. A green light, a flicker from the hard disk light, then... nothing. Time for The Tools.

Working feverishly, I removed the wrap-around casing from the midi-tower case, and peered inside to see if anything obvious was amiss - was the processor - a Celeron 466 PGA flatpack job - unseated? It was hard to say, at first glance, since the whole cavity was a mass of what looked like dark brown candy floss, flecked here and there with crystalline Demerara sugar. A dead spider caught my eye, nestled snugly between two 64MB DIMMs, the remnants of its last meal - a house fly - a couple of inches from it, perched on top of the processor fan. A rat's nest would be cleaner.

You wouldn't keep your house like that

I marvelled at the gunk, and reached into my bag for the mini vacuum cleaner that I've carried for years to suck up toner spills. Setting it to full chuck, I allowed it to swallow as much of the candy floss as it could, and dusted the rest out with a handily placed headscarf. Slipping the clamp off the processor fan, I gently lifted it out of the case, still tethered to the disk cage, and tried to spin the fan itself. Hah! I might as well have tried to get free backstage passes to a Robbie Williams concert. It was seized solid. Stuck. Completely immovable. About as mobile as the Rock of Gibraltar. In short, it had given up the ghost.

Aside from that, it was patently not up to the job. It might have been OK on a Pentium 100 or something similarly lowly, but there was no way it was going to cope with a 466 for any appreciable length of time. Even so, it should have lasted longer than it did - the machine was hardly over a year old.

The main cause of its demise was gunk. That candy floss inside the case was the accumulation of all sorts of bits of hair, dust, more dust, bits of dead skin, all aerated by the processor fan. It had, over the course of a year, sucked every last drop of lubrication from the fan, which had, over time, slowed down and finally seized. Its counterpart in the power supply had also seized, but that was more a case of scraping the gunk from the fan surround - once that was done, it actually turned. It was fixable.

Not so the Celeron. It was properly dead - burned out. There would have to be a new processor. As it happened, just in case you're wondering, there was a spare machine of a much more recent vintage into which I dropped the hard drive from the corpse, and which, luckily, fired up straight away to rebuild the driver set Windows needed. The payroll run went ahead less than two hours after I arrived. I was a hero!

Clean it

The whole episode, of course, makes an important point. The dead machine was situated in a very clean area, populated mostly by a staff of very respectable a clean-living ladies of the feminine gender, none of whom smoke in the room (it's a site-wide ban anyway), and none of whom are of the 'must brush my hair now' brigade. Their desks are spotless, as is the floor. It's the cleanest workspace I've ever come across. Even so, all this gunk had gathered in that machine (and all the others, I suspected).

Now, my own machines are constantly in a state of flux. Hardly a week goes by without the back comes off one or another so that a new piece of review kit can be slotted in. I've always had an aversion to having dusty hands, so I tend to give the innards a quick once-over while I'm doing whatever job it is I have to do. The result is that my machine are always clean inside - and my own office is as far from a smoke free zone as you'll find, my two dogs shed their hair all over the place, there's always something floating about to gunge things up. But the PCs are checked, almost as a by-product of what I do, regularly.

My advice to you is to get the lid off regularly, and make sure that the innards of your PC are clean. Wipe round the power supply fan every so often - once a month is fine - with a baby bud, and marvel at the crud you get off.

Do the same with your processor fan - but do remember to take anti-static precautions. Either buy a proper earthing strap, or make sure that the PC remains plugged in (and switched off) and the you're always touching the case with bare flesh. If either fan looks as though it's failing, replace it. Don't wait for it to die, or it will take your processor, and maybe your motherboard, with it.

I've got one machine that's been happily processing now for eight years. It's as clean as a whistle inside, and it's had three new fans, one way or another. It owes me nothing at all. Keep yours clean!

 

David Dorn