Aug 15 2009
Hot Air
One of the things, actually, the number one thing I hate about life is maintenance. I hate having to maintain everything. It doesn’t matter what it is. Something is always breaking down or getting dirty, requiring attention.
Maintaining electronics is one of those things that I’m pretty good with, but blowing the dust out of my PCs is something I don’t do often enough and I got worried when I noticed my main PC was blowing a lot of hot air out of the back. What surprised me was that it felt like it was coming exclusively out of the power supply fan and not the case fan below it.
I was instantly worried about a dead case fan because my Dell is no longer on warranty and I figured that Dell likely uses a proprietary connection to the motherboard. All of their equipment is proprietary, after all.
After taking the side panel off, I blew out all of the dust. Most of it was in the front, blocking each and every one of the holes in the front of the case, meaning little to no fresh air was coming in from the front to cool everything.
I then turned my attention to the fans in the rear of the case. All of the fans seemed to spin fine when I blew a little compressed air in them.
At this point, I turned on my PC with the side panel off to see which, if any, of my fans spun up. And to my delight, they all came on.
I’m not a very big fan of Dell’s design of this case (Inspiron 531). There is no fan in the front to suck in air. Adding a second hard drive blocks off a portion of the side panel which has holes for additional fresh air. It kind of makes those holes pointless. And then that back case fan doesn’t spin very fast. I’d rather deal with the noise than overheating issues. I haven’t gone into the BIOS to see if there is a setting for increasing the fan speed. I don’t know how much configuring Dell allows these days. If memory serves, they prefer to lock down their systems for the most part.
The power supply is still blowing fairly warm air, but it’s not as hot as it was, so I’m pleased by that. I wish Dell would spend more time and money researching case designs with good airflow.
Ah…PC maintenance–you always have to deal with it at some point or another. Right now my ancient Dell laptop (it’s 8-years-old now) has a strange issue with the track stick. Here I never use it–I use the touch pad; back then all Dell laptops came with both the pad and the nipple–but it’s decided to become possessed. Sometimes everything is fine and then bam! the mouse cursor starts taking off–moving around the screen on its own so fast sometimes it’s hard to keep up with it. I tried the young priest and the old priest routine but nothing seems to help! lol I did find though that if it happens and I shut it off and if I tip it on its side, when I turn it back on it’s back to normal. That’s how figured out it was the nipple. Anyway. I tried taking it apart and disconnecting it, but Dell has that thing pretty much sealed until Judgment Day 😉
The thing I like most about my PC now that I’ve cleaned out the dust, is that the heatsink fan doesn’t spin up every time I do something that is CPU intense. The fan wasn’t able to draw the hot air through the heatsink and away from the CPU very efficiently because the little fins on the heatsink were thoroughly covered with a layer of dust. Most of the dust is gone and I’ve yet to hear that fan have to spin up since doing it.