Slashdot Mirror
Making Your PC Dust Free?
Kranfer asks: "Recently, I cleaned out my PC to find not only dust... but also feathers from my from rather large parrots. I have struggled with keeping my PC dust free for years, but I have yet to find a workable solution that will keep the dust from stacking up every few months, inside my PCs at home. I was hoping that my peers on Slashdot might have thought up some innovative solutions to this common problem with any PC. How does one cut down on the dust entering a PC and sticking around? I run an Antec File Server Case with each and every fan slot taken blowing out, and even one of those Harddrive coolers and PCI slot coolers. What have you done to rid yourself of the dust and pet dander inside your PCs?"
Put fan filters on all of your fans! They cost around $1 and do a good job.
The hip way to get your IP. No ads, ever.
each and every fan slot taken blowing out
That is your first problem, you need as many fans sucking in that you have blowing out. You might have three sucking in on the front of the case, and three blowing out. This will mean less load on the fans, less dirt coming in through crevasses since it needs a place to get air, and better cooling
I think someone else said filters for your fans, and that would be a viable solution as long as you changed them out ever-so-often.
Sig: I stole this sig.
Yes. Stockings. From the significant other that you wish you had. They make excellent, cheap dust filters.
I started working on computers back in the 80's when everybody had their own custom case, style, and philosophy. I worked for a well known mom-and-pop computer shop in our city that had a reputation for low prices so I was working on pretty much everything. Many of the higher-end PC's were built with the large-computer mentality of the mainframe / minicomputer era of over-engineering. Besides being overpriced, many included filters over the fan because "real computers" had them. Most of the time the filters were more trouble than they were worth.
The primary problem was that people were not cleaning the filters. Out-of-sight, out-of-mind. Putting filters over your fans means that somebody has to regularily check and change them. I've had PC's on shop floors that had the filters so clogged with oil and gunk that the fans they were covering burned out from overload. After I replaced them and explained everything to them I might have to go back 6 months later to do the exact same thing because "they hadn't got around to changing them". I've burned my fingers on parts inside some of those machines, and that was the days before heat sinks in the first place.
Filters are good as long as you're going to religiously inspect them every month or so and clean or replace them.
As a passing curiosity, does anybody know exactly how much heat the load resistor on one of the old original 63.5 watt PC's put out when you had it hooked up in place of the 2nd floppy drive? I remember one particular system that was in a dusty factory. Somebody had jury-rigged a filter across the front of the system using window screen and medical gauze. The gauze had gunked up so much the fan in the power supply was basically worthless. A coworker managed to get a second degree burn off the load-resistor and I never could figure out how that managed to happen with something that only had 63.5 watts in the first place.