The symptoms of dust buildup, what are they?
What causes it?
But more importantly, how do you fix it?
Let's take it to the bench.
Wes, good to see you again.
Hey, good to see you too, Zach.
Thanks for taking the time.
I know you love dust.
Oh, absolutely man.
I tell you what, you know, my nose, allergies, that's right.
Don't be all of that?
So here we are.
I suspect that I might have a dust buildup.
What are some of the symptoms of dust buildup?
Well, one of the biggest ones
is any kind of like thermal related type symptoms.
And thermal is just fancy for saying, hey, it's getting hot.
And yeah, so dust a lot of times, what it's going to do is,
it's going to manifest itself in one of two ways.
One of the ways that you can see
are random reboots within your system.
And a lot of times it doesn't happen right away.
That did happen. I had a reboot.
And so I didn't know, I didn't think it'd be dust.
I didn't think dust would cause it.
Sure, so let me do a little bit of interrogation here.
So I would say, we're going to go through a day
in the life of Zach's computer here.
Well, maybe not today, just a few minutes.
So you push power on your computer that a lot of time,
or what I'm thinking might have happened
is your computer works fine for a little while,
maybe a few minutes, maybe even longer than that.
Maybe you launch up an application
that really needs some computational power,
needs to have plenty of CPU maybe.
And then all of a sudden, after using it, it reboots.
It happened.
Well, that is usually a sign.
I mean, it could be a sign of a couple other things, right?
It could be a sign of component failure,
if you've got a cripple cooling system,
which we'll also look at that coming up here
in another episode.
But dust and debris when it comes down to it,
the main thing is it causes overheating.
You can see that the temperature of the system unit
is running a little bit hot.
And then ultimately, in the user experience,
if you're not really doing investigation,
like to the system temperature,
it's just going to manifest itself in a reboot.
So it sounds like I'm baking a cake in there.
So that being said, the symptoms, we got that,
but what's the cause?
What's the cause of all that?
I mean, I live in a home that's very, very clean.
I keep it that way.
I changed my filters often,
and the air conditioning, and whatnot.
So what's causing it?
Well, let's go ahead and back up on that statement.
I know you'd like to keep a clean house,
you mentioned the filters.
Why do you change the filters?
Because they get filled with dust and debris.
Yes, they do.
And honestly, joking aside, Zach,
that's really not much different
than what we see inside of our computer cases.
And it doesn't matter if we're talking about something
like the laptop that I have up here on the desk,
something like the desktop
that we're going to see here momentarily,
or even if you're talking, like, for instance,
in a server closet in a data center.
We had to keep systems operational by keeping them cool.
And when dust and debris gets in the air,
a lot of times you can't see it.
And it's not necessarily floating in the air
where you could see it.
So it just accumulates over time.
And here in Florida, we've got the summer months,
it gets really, really dusty inside,
because it's so hot, you don't want to go outside,
but then let's say…
The AC is always going.
It's always going, absolutely.
And it's trying to condition the air,
but it's pulling a lot of dust.
And all you have to do is look at any event in your house,
like you just mentioned, cleaning those vents,
and you can see that the dust has buildup.
If you're talking about some of the colder regions,
maybe up in the northeast and stuff,
during the winter months, gets very dusty
because people are shut in.
Well, yeah, they've got their furnace going.
Yeah. Other things that can happen to it,
it could just be location.
If you happen to work,
maybe at a computer sitting in an area in an office
where potentially there's a lot of dust generated in the air.
If a company that has some kind of computers,
that's a lumber mill,
or if it's a concrete company, concrete facility.
You have somebody that's probably going to have
a computer in there that's taking invoices and stuff.
So location can be another one of those big causes.
Let me show you here.
In fact, I've got a picture pulled up
on Wiki Commons right here.
Oh, that’s lovely.
Oh, yeah. So we can see this one.
Yeah, we can see a lot of dust here in this system.
So again, just giving credit where credit is due here.
This is a Wiki Common.
You can see dust buildup in the computer.
But again, you could see a lot of dust here,
lots of dust around this power cable.
It's an older computer.
You could definitely tell because the old ribbon cables here,
but there is a lot of dust.
And not only the cause of dust.
This doesn't happen overnight.
Doesn't happen within a week.
I can tell you this is probably one of those things
that also is caused not only by the dust,
but the neglect to maintain the PC properly.
Lack of maintenance.
Exactly. To get that dust out of there.
I wonder if that's what the inside of my computer looks like.
It very well could be.
Oh, my goodness.
That’s right. So at this point, then Obi-Wan,
I want to ask you, what is the solution?
How can we fix this?
Well, I tell you what, what do you say we go ahead
and we clear off my computer and we get the bench prepped up.
We'll take a little break here,
we'll get our components over here, we'll come back
and we can show you some of the solutions to the issue.
And then also some things that you can help prevent this as well.
The magic of Timmy timeout, we'll be right back.
Okay, so we’ve laid out a PC build right here, the tower.
And we've got a few other things going on over here.
And I'm sure you’re going to tell us all about that.
What's the first thing that we can discuss
when talking about the solution to our dust buildup?
Well, it really depends on your case
and how your case is manufactured.
Sometimes cases will come with a few extra features
that help when it comes to keeping dust out to begin with.
In fact, one of the things I noticed
when I put this case up there is,
you didn’t probably notice that one right there.
Yeah, I was going to ask you that.
Well, this is a little sliding piece right here.
A little screen or vent.
Yeah, that's a dust filter.
So remember like you were talking about in your AC there,
that you clean your dust filters.
Well, these are actually reusable
unlike the ones that you have in your AC unit,
central heating and air unit here in Florida.
Typically, what you have to do
is you have to replace those, right?
Yeah.
I'll go ahead and take that.
And what this does is,
essentially what we're doing here is when this gets dusty,
we can actually wash this off, we can set it out to dry.
Now that's not the only one.
I'll let you go ahead and there is a magnet around here,
reach over there and pull that off the top here.
Yeah, it’s magnetized.
You might not even know that that one even exists,
but that's another form of one.
Look at that.
And that actually came with this Phanteks case.
You could see there. And this one has…
That’s fantastic.
Yeah, so this has magnets on the outside of it.
And it just literally slips
and it's supposed to stick to the top of the case there.
Now, I will tell you, it's kind of defeating the purpose here.
Well, not really defeating the purpose.
If there was a fan on there,
it would be helping to catch some of that air.
But as air gets pulled in from the case,
or pulled into the case, and exhausted out of the case,
these different vents that we have here,
in combination with the dust filter, they can get clogged up.
They can get clogged up with dirt, or dust and debris.
So it's important that if you don't have one of these,
you're definitely mindful of the vents that we have.
And if we look at our tech cam here,
you can see there's a series of vents on the back.
We've got vents here where the fan is.
Every one of these areas can potentially get crippled by…
Clogged if you will.
- I meant to say crippling the cooling system if they are clogged. - Crippling clog.
Yeah, there we go.
We'll make our own contributions
to the English language for sure.
Well, it's really amazing because my PC,
my tower doesn't have these filters.
In fact, what it has is entrapment doors.
So it just old then.
It's old. It’s like 10 years old or so.
What do we have over here, Wes?
What is this right here?
All right. Well, we've got a couple of things here.
One of the big things that I really like.
This is called a DataVac.
And this just happens to be a brand MetroVac.
If you haven't seen one of these before,
this is what's known as a anti-static vacuum.
So you can use vacuums on these.
And well, pretty much everybody knows the process
of a vacuum, you have to be careful.
But what's good about this type of vacuum,
is the fact that the motor in it
doesn't generate a static charge.
You might notice that one of the things here,
I've got an ESD wrist strap on.
That just prevents any static charge
because it doesn't take a lot of static electricity
to ruin the sensitive circuitry that are inside of your case.
Well, this vacuum doesn't generate that static electricity
and then dissipates it to any of your components in here.
So this is a really good thing to have.
And I would recommend
that if you have to do a lot of these,
like I used to work in a training institute,
where we had upwards of 200 computers,
and we would go room to room
and we just knock them out
like a checklist on PC maintenance.
And we would use one of these.
If there were areas where maybe we only had
a couple of computers that we needed to do,
we would use something like this.
Condensed air.
Yeah. This right here is just a little bit of compressed air.
And you got to be careful with it.
You don't want to ever shake the can.
If you shake the can, you can freeze it.
Yes, I had that happen.
I got frostbite from a can once.
Yeah, so you just have to be careful on it.
I've done it too, myself, you get in a hurry.
And that's why if you've got a lot of them to do,
I would definitely recommend something like this,
especially if you're doing this as part of your job.
If you've got one or two computers
that maybe you're just helping out,
or maybe it's your own computer,
I would say that this would be the way to go.
And this just happens to be CRC Duster,
and this just the one that I picked up.
It doesn't matter what the brand is, just be very careful.
In fact, if we take a bird's eye view,
I'll show you how you would go about using this.
So I'm just going to remove the bolts
from the sidewall of this case.
And we'll take the plexiglass case off here.
And I'm just going to set this to the side temporarily.
Now, you have some points
that you would have to be mindful of like,
for instance, your heatsink,
the fins here essentially help to pull the heat in
from the CPU and dissipated away from the CPU
and pull it into itself and then the fan blows that hot air out.
Well, when these fins, when they get clogged with the dust,
unfortunately, what happens is, it becomes an insulator.
So you just take the compressed air,
still a couple short little bursts.
Same thing with your fans back here, you'd hit your fan.
And if we go to the tech cam,
you can see the fan spin when I do this.
See the fun is spinning.
Yeah, there it goes.
We used to have fun with these
because you can make them make a really cool sound.
And then the same thing I would do.
The other thing I would do is I would take off
like for instance, this case,
we can take off the front of the case.
And then you'll see there's a fan right here.
And what I would do is take some short bursts of there.
Now, notice that it's already condensing?
Yes.
All right. That's okay.
It's going to condense even more.
It's going to freeze up on it,
and then you can't use it and it becomes a waste.
So you'd want to let this can just sit
so you don't have that problem.
Again, not a big deal, just short bursts of air inside
and make sure all that dust, you get all that dust out.
If it's really dusty,
I would suggest probably wearing a mask.
Think about HEPA filters on vacuums.
There's a reason they put them there
because it could irritate you,
and especially if you're doing a lot of these.
Like I said, once you get through 50 computers,
if you get a lot of dust in the air,
it could start to play havoc on your sinuses.
I know you and I have talked about them,
we're not short on sinus problems,
and you can definitely accelerate those.
So that's essentially it, just short compressed air.
I would do this as part of PC maintenance.
I wouldn't wait till you have an issue.
Do proactive maintenance on it, use compressed air.
If you're in an area where you've got quite a few of these to do,
like I've had to do in the other training institutes
that I've worked for, then I would definitely recommend
one of these anti-static MetroVacs.
And I mentioned like anything else, if you schedule this,
if you schedule your maintenance, then you won't get behind.
That's right.
It won't be taking you over, so to speak,
as we saw in that picture you showed us earlier.
That's right.
Yeah, just schedule it.
And remember, scheduling is only half the battle.
You can schedule all you want,
- but if you don't follow through with it, then it doesn't… - You got to do it.
Yeah, it doesn't really help you.
Well, Wes, anything else?
No. That's it.
Again, just make sure
that you're mindful of how you use this.
Be very careful with it.
You do not use your one and a half horsepower shot vac
because it's got a lot of static charge.
Make sure you use one of these anti-static vacuums.
Well, thank you because you helped us
identify the symptoms, and the sources of dust buildup,
and I appreciate it, Wes.
My PC appreciates it, too.