Affects of Dust on Hardware??

Hey ya,

I just have a quick question,

I have the feeling that when my rig becomes kinda dusty that the performance of my rigs decreases significantly... Does dust have anything to do with it? Whats the most effective way to get rid of the dust (low level vacuum cleaner is not a possibility) without damaging anything??

Greets

Mauli

I had an old Windows 98 machine (ahhhh those were the good old days ) that i rebooted a few weeks ago having not booted it for a few years. The first thing it did was have all the fans shoot a cloud of dust into the room. I don't really think dust has that much affect on computer parts unless you don't use the computer for long periods of time and the dust accumulates. The fans in a computer do a pretty good job of blowing at least some dust out of the case, and I have never heard of anyone ever having a problem with dust so im not worried about it. But if you are then open your case and do some dusting work.

falcon6268 said:

I had an old Windows 98 machine (ahhhh those were the good old days ) that i rebooted a few weeks ago having not booted it for a few years. The first thing it did was have all the fans shoot a cloud of dust into the room. I don't really think dust has that much affect on computer parts unless you don't use the computer for long periods of time and the dust accumulates. The fans in a computer do a pretty good job of blowing at least some dust out of the case, and I have never heard of anyone ever having a problem with dust so im not worried about it. But if you are then open your case and do some dusting work.

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That's older hardware. Older machines don't generate the heat modern hardware does and therefore aren't affected. 486s and Pentiums, even many Pentium IIs, mostly used passive heatsinks and were cooled sufficiently. The fins were large and really didn't get clogged with dust easily. Modern heatsinks have many small fins to increase the surface area so even a small amount of dust can clog the fins decreasing cooling.

This discussion comes up periodically and the result is always the same. Dust in modern equipment leads to heat buildup and shorter life span on components. That doesn't mean you should spaz at every miniscule particle but using a can of compressed air around the heatsinks, slots and case fans once a month helps keep things clear and ensure good airflow.

Dust can affect performance but in a small way. Dust on exposed circuits can affect how it operates. The heat build up also reduces its overhead performance. The rule of the thumb is to clean out your system every month or three months.

-J.

great thank you guys

Realistically, dust doesn't affect performance. What's it going to do, clog the processor? Now, if you have some kind of thermal throttling, if your computer gets too hot, the system might deliberately slow itself down to prevent itself from overheating, systems like AMD's "Cool and Quiet", for example.

But what dust can do is cake on some more delicate electricity-regulating devices, and cause them to short circuit and fail. Explode isn't accurate, but capacitors can pop open when they die, and leak on other components, and though the leakage itself isn't even a high risk, it's the electrical irregularities that follow shortly. The mis-conducted electricity can cause real havoc on parts, putting every other component of a computer at risk. These failures do not cause degraded performance. They mean total breakdown of a computer. Even if they don't affect every part of the computer, it's not likely that the computer can chug along without any single failed component. If one thing is broken, nothing may work.

Dust is bad. Clean it out. Do not use a vacuum cleaner, they generate lots of static electricity; buy some cans of "air" or use a compressor to blow the dust off.

What could more reasonably degrade your computer's functions is also related to a kind of disrepair; while your computer needs to be clean for it's very electrical sake, so does your operating system. Consider a regiment of spyware and virus removal, driver cleanups, uninstalling disused software and disk maintainance (things like Windows' Disk Cleanup and a good defragmenting). If the last time you did a clean install of your OS more than a couple years ago, you might only have that last-ditch effort to improve overall performance. This is pretty standard maintainance, but it's annoying and boring, so I'm sure most of us put it off.

And of course, before you dick around with your computer, back up any information you'll get sick over losing.

Dust will turn an FX-60 into a K6-II 400. It cloggs the pins that were used to change the architecture and leaves you with an older processor. It even downgrades windows XP to DOS. I've also heard it through the grapevine that it made a whole country disappear one time because it looked at it funny. Dust also hates pirates.

lol

-J.