Dust Your PC - Part 2

Should you dust your computer? Yes, why not, it cannot hurt. But , there are tangible benefits of cleaning your computer, even if it seems stable right now.

Computers & electronics in general don't like heat. Dust blocks fans in your case, which usually chilled you CPU, video card & motherboard parts. Dust also blocks fans & their airflow in to & out of your case. Chilled air needs to be brought in to a case, & then the host air dispelled. If the airways are blocked, technique temperature can rise quickly. If your computer is stable but the CPU is walking hot, you cut down on its lifespan, potentially quickly.

More important to plenty of people though, may be the result of that first heat related computer lock up. Even if it is never been an issue before, if your computer crashes at the wrong time it can be catastrophic. Usually mine locks up when I am away from it, or overnight, & I turn it back on & restart Firefox & haven't lost anything important. But last week it locked up with unsaved graphs for my last editorial & Excel selected no to auto save. I spent the hour it took to redo them thinking about ways to eliminate these lock ups.

Of coursework, reducing heat is also always a priority for individuals who overclock their CPU. For those that don't know, overclocking is walking a CPU at a higher frequency than it was sold to run at. For example, you could take your Intel Pentium that is walking at a "clock" rate of GHz, & try to run it at.1 GHz,.5 GHz, faster speeds, or anywhere in between. I have an elderly dual CPU technique that was supposed to run at 366 MHz. In lieu I ran the chips at 500 MHz each, which was an immense performance gain. Overclocking is actually a great way to get more "free" performance out of a technique, as long as you can maintain stability. Usually the single largest factor for success is reducing heat as much as feasible.

Another thing to note is that while it is important to keep CPU heat to a maximum, hard drives, video cards, & other parts all need to be kept chilled as well. In fact, I don't know for positive that my CPUs are the current issue. I think they are, but my next guess (if I am correct that it is a heat issue) would be my video card, since I have checked, & it runs hot.

Think about this as well, if my CPU were to actually cease working because it was hot, it would probably be a gradual technique, & I could fix the situation by purchasing a replacement. If my hard drive crashes & ultimately loses data that could be a way more problematic situation. I could replace the drive, but recovering the data could be far more difficult than replacing a CPU.