Cleaning Jem’s PC
Processor - Expansion Slots - Power Unit
These pages were written to show you, the reader, what happens inside a PC when it is left running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with no cleaning for a few years.
The subject of this article is Jem’s AMD K6, a hard working, long suffering machine. Since it was out of use in the summer break, we decided to give it a reward and a checkup. The findings surprised us both..that it was still running OK was quite staggering!
These images were all taken after we’d already started stripping it down.
Now..here are some shots of the inside of the PC. First, you see the motherboard expansion card area (and my hand). In the second image, you see the area of the motherboard where the processor sits (that big chip covered in muck and white heatsink compound. In the lower image, you can see the memory sockets, and one of the RAM chips.
See the dust film on everything? Not good. On expansion slots it can mess up the electrical signals, and on processors it can insulate and hold in the heat, which is bad news for the chips involved.
The processor was gently removed from it’s socket, and the whole thing was de-cabled and treated to a thorough going over with a soft paintbrush, and a Dyson vacuum cleaner was used to extract all the dust.
The only picture I have here right now. Not good quality, but it shows enough! Note that you can now actually SEE all the chips and circuit lines on the motherboard! All the cables got wiped over with a soft cloth, all the parts were removed and dusted, then re-seated after their connectors got a clean. The north-bridge chip (gold coloured ridged heatsink, half hidden under a cable) in particular will benefit from the improved airflow.
Even a thin dust layer can affect a PC..this PC is now so clean it’s reflective. It wasn’t a hard job, and in the long term..this PC now has a much better probability of not suffering from an early death.