A common question I get as a mobile computer engineer is "Do I need to clean my computer?", as in physically clean it. The simple answer to this is "Yes, but be careful how you do it".

Your average home or small-business PC sits under desk, on a relatively dusty bit of carpet, sucking in thousands of cubic meters of air a year. So it should come as no surprise that a significant quantity of dust, hair and other detritus passes through your computer's case. Some of this dirt sticks to parts of the computer and builds up over time. This build up can cause pretty serious problems.

Probably the most obvious and dramatic build-up is dirt in the CPU heatsink. Heatsinks by their nature have a large surface area in a small volume. It's like they are designed to collect dirt and fluff. This acts as an insulator, preventing proper heat transfer to the air being blown over it by the fan and so the CPU runs hot. If the build-up is bad enough the PC will overheat, and turn itself off. Pretty much ALL heatsinks build up a fair amount of dirt over a year and having your PC turn off in this way is likely to damage the file system or even the hard disk, and that is not good news. Even if it's not that extreme, at the very least it can make the PC much noisier as the fan struggles to cool the chip. T

Another worrying place for dust to settle is on the RAM modules where the conductive metal strips are close enough together to allow some current to leak if the dust build-up is bad enough. Again this can cause some pretty serious problems including the eventual failure of the RAM itself.

There are other components and parts to a PC that don't like being dirty or too hot and all of those can cause mild to serious problems.

Laptops suffer from fluff and dirt build-up very commonly and again it can mean their early demise. It's very common for a laptop more than a year old to be much louder and hotter than it was when you bought it. This can be both annoying for the user and unsafe for the laptop. The trouble with laptop is that getting that dirt out is a lot harder and may require dismantling much of the laptop which is a risky procedure for the inexperienced.

So how can I clean my computer?

Well you need to get into the case and get the dirt off. With some PCs this can be fairly straight-forward but others more complicated. There are risks involved and if you're not confident than you should ask a professional to do it. Brushes and vacuums can both cause electrostatic discharge (ESD) which can silently kill a computer and you need to be careful what you use to blow dirt off with too. But if you take the right precautions it's safe enough and worth doing.

Laptops are trickier and how you do it depends on the design of your particular unit. One thing you should NOT do is to use compressed air/gas dusters poked into the grills because more often than not, this will just blow the fluff further into the machine.

Mobile Techie's Computer MOT

If you don't fancy getting down and dirty with your beloved PC then Mobile Techie offers a Computer MOT service. Not only will your computer be professionally cleaned but whilst we're at it we'll check to make sure it has no viruses, that the disks are not about to fail and lose your data, that you have all the required updates, the security holes are patched and we'll tune the whole system to get it working as fast as it's capable. This is offered at a value-for-money fixed rate and can be done onsite at your convenience. If you're interested, please get in touch! :-)