Cleaning Away Dust in Your PC

PCs, Air Cooling, and Dust

Besides software maintenance such as disk defragmentation, Windows updates, and virus scans, hardware maintenance is also important. If you have owned a PC for a year or more, chances are that there has been a noticeable dust build up on the interior. Dust build up can lead to excessive operating temperatures. Excessive temperatures can lead to PC crashes. One of the ingredients of a stable PC is an adequately cooled PC. Hence, the need to every now and clean away dust build up in your PC.

I have a VMware ESX server running at home running 24/7. It's amazingly stable, one of the most stable machines that I have ever dealt with. Running since June 2006, it has been running 24/7 for 99.9% uptime. The bulk of the downtime is from scheduled events such as software upgrades or dust cleaning. A 3.2Ghz Intel Pentium Northwood processor, 4GB of parity memory, and 3 SCSI drives. I happy to report that it has been running for the last three years without any failures. That's nice reliability. To give you an idea of the complexity, this ESX box is running 5 virtual Windows 2003 PCs.

Today's PCs produce a lot of heat. This heat needs to be expelled to the air. The heat transfer surfaces inside a PC operate most efficiently when they are clean. Unfortunately, inevitably they collect dust. The dust can cause temperatures of PC components to rise and become unstable or even fail permanently. If you are unlucky to experience a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD), a fatal error event in Windows, you have to ask yourself if heat is a possible cause. It is possible for an overheated PC to become unstable and generate a BSOD. Hopefully, if you've been cleaning your PC regularly, you can rule out overheating.

To play it safe, before cleaning your PC, take precautions against Electrostatic Discharge (ESD) Damage with a grounding strap or leaving the PC grounded. (See sidebar.)

Basic Cleaning Tools: Compressed Air and a Handheld Vacuum

Good tools to have are a vacuum and a can of compressed air. I like to use my Dyson Root 6 for cleaning the PC.

If there are places where the vacuum can't reach, I use the can of compressed air to dislodge dust and hold the vacuum over the area being blown to collect the airborne dust.

An alternative to using a can of compressed air to dislodge dust is a rubber hand blower. See sidebar.

Cleaning Rear Intake

I have noticed that there dust accumulates on three places:

1. Intake port at the back of the tower
2. Intake port at the front of the PC tower
3. Processor Heatsink

This tower PC has two intakes. For me, the dustiest places on the PC are the intake ports. On this ESX server, I have two intake ports. One on the back of machine that I can clean well from the outside.

Cleaning Front Intake

Here's my second air intake port. It actually has a sponge-like filter that sits behind a perforated metal plate.

Cleaning the Processor's Heatsink

Next, the heatsink atop the processor usually needs a good cleaning. This Intel Northwood 3.2Ghz processor burns about 95 watts of power. The tiny fins often act as a dust trap over time. Here, I blow the fins clean with my compressed air can with my vacuum hovering on top to try to capture most of the dislodged dust that is sent airborne.