The computer began to make a lot of noise, it slows down or shuts down by itself, and you can’t remember when you last got it from under the table? Most likely, the system unit has reached a critical stage of clogging. In this case, cleaning the computer from dust will help to speed up its work and protect components from overheating and involuntary short circuits.
What do you need?
Maintenance refers to the initial level of complexity, so you can complete the entire procedure yourself, spending about an hour on this. To clean the computer or laptop from dust, the following devices are required:
- Crosshead screwdriver.
- Antistatic brush.
- Vacuum cleaner or compressor.
- A place that can be stained with dust: a bathroom, garage, street or just a room with an active exhaust hood.
Do I need to change thermal grease?
If the room in which the computer is used has very little dusty and wet cleaning, it may be necessary to service the fans much more often than with ordinary PCs. When cleaning a computer from dust at home, it is not always possible to replace thermal paste, so in this lesson we will skip the procedure for replacing it and focus on dust.
In principle, thermal paste replacement is not always necessary. Standard paste is able to maintain its properties from six months to several years, depending on the average temperature of the system and the frequency of use of the computer.
If you decide to blow coolers every few months, then you can not touch the old thermal grease, but conduct only superficial maintenance of coolers and the board.
Disassembly and preparation
To get to the main components, you must remove at least one cover of the system unit. Any case can be disassembled very simply by unscrewing the mounting bolts on the back wall. There are usually four (two on the cover, the top is non-separable) or one (on the top, the side covers have handles for quick removal). However, there are cases with latches for disassembling without tools, or the bolts may have handles.
To clean your computer from dust, a high-pressure compressor is best suited. For a one-time procedure, you can purchase compressed air in a spray can, it is also a kind of compressor analog, but with less pressure and limited volume. If there is neither one nor the other, you can use the floor pump, but this method is much worse.
Be that as it may, unscrew the right cover, and you can begin the procedure.
Cleaning the main cooler
Cleaning your computer from dust begins with a processor cooling system. As practice shows, an air cooling system is the dirtiest element in a computer. But even the dirtiest fan can be dealt with in a few minutes. The cleaning process is as follows:
- Find a place where you can thoroughly purge your computer without fear of flying dust.
- Completely disconnect the power supply from the elements of the computer and even more so from the network, so as not to provoke a short circuit.
- Remove the entire cooling system if a thermal paste change is planned. If you just want to remove the dust, you can only unscrew the fan. Often it is fastened with four bolts, but latches can also be found.
- For cleaning, you can use: brush, cotton swabs, air, or something that in a particular case will help you. Rinse the radiator with water, be sure to disconnect the fan, and then dry well.
At the end of the work, reassemble everything in the reverse order. Do not forget to connect the fan power, otherwise there may not be any benefit from cleaning.
Board service
Removing the board may not be necessary if you have a compressor or the computer is not too dirty. And a few dust particles on the other side of the board are usually not worth the time taken to disassemble.
So, the computer is disassembled, you can begin to begin the fight against dust. The most problematic places on the system board include:
- PCI slots.
- Ports
- Radiators
- IDE slots.
When cleaning your computer from dust at home, a brush will help. It is important that it is precisely antistatic in order to avoid electrification of the legs of the elements. To extract the remaining dirt, the same compressor or vacuum cleaner is suitable.
Particular attention should be paid to USB ports, for several years without using them, lumps of such a density can form that it is impossible to connect anything. You can pick it up with a needle or also knock it out with air.
Cleaning the graphics card
When cleaning the computer from dust, a video card must be serviced. Serving a video adapter is practically no different from caring for a motherboard. The actions are approximately the same:
- Disconnect and remove the graphics card from the chassis.
- Disconnect fan power.
- If you plan to replace thermal paste, unscrew the entire radiator. On different video cards, this procedure looks different, so if you are not confident in your abilities, then take the trouble to find the specification for disassembling your video card.
- Blow the radiator thoroughly with a compressor / water / brush. Pay attention to the joints of the petals. Dust should not remain at all or as little as possible.
- Reassemble everything in reverse order and you can connect.
Power Supply
This element may be the main dust collector, which can adversely affect the operation of the computer. In addition, clogging not only warms the walls, but can also be a decent conductor, and this is already fraught with a short circuit and PSU failure. Cleaning the computer's power supply from dust is the most different from servicing other components, but still extremely simple.
The PSU can be removed by unscrewing four mounting bolts at the back of the housing. It is also not difficult to disassemble it:
- Often, the PSU case is assembled on four bolts located at the top. Unscrew them and the lid will detach.
- Be careful! A fan can be attached to it, respectively, a sharp movement can damage the power cable. Disconnect it if necessary.
- Next is to unscrew the fans. Please note: each PSU model has a different design, so it is extremely difficult to provide universal instructions. You should rely on your experience or read about the maintenance of your model, if you are interested or definitely do not want to break something.
- Blow the PSU board with a compressor or a brush in hard-to-reach places, clean the fans.
- Reassemble everything in reverse order.
- Install back into the housing.
- Make sure everything is assembled correctly and that power can be connected.
Done, the computer is assembled and ready to go. To test the temperature, you can use third-party utilities, such as CoreTemp, or view the data in the BIOS.
Other elements
Unlike other computer parts, dusting the hard drive and the optical drive on a regular basis is not required because they are simply not able to accumulate dirt. During maintenance, these parts can be purged with a compressor without being removed from the housing.
As a rule, the rest of the computer does not need much cleaning. Nevertheless, if there are additional coolers, radiators, complex elements in which dust is clogged in your case, then it is also recommended to clean them at least superficially.