We keep seeing computers with an extra domestic fan stuffed up the back.
Well you really need to empty your vacuum cleaner at least once in it’s lifetime.
Most people expect an IT specialist to be always in a suit and its a clean office based job, well I have news for you, we are often scrabbling around on the floor and dealing with dirt and filth.
Imagine you have a box on the ground, it is on all day and maybe night, whenever the office is open, it sucks in the air (Dust and everything). Your cleaner comes in with the vac and stirs the ground a bit more.
Five years have passed, open the box and what do expect to see? something like this?
Its what we see every day when we open up a machine that has sat on the ground for a couple of years. Apart from being less reliable as there are mechanics inside every computer its a fire risk and unless a machine is cleaned each year this is what can happen
The picture on the left is what a two year old heatsink looks like and the photo on the right is what it should look like. A processor gets hot, like a 100w bulb and you wouldn’t want to handle one of them without gloves
If we get hot we perspire, a dog pants and a cat sweats through its paws, what about a computer? Well the heart is a CPU and it runs hot, so hot it will burn you. A heatsink is added and then a fan, it doesn’t work by evaporation, which is how perspiration works, it works be exchanging heat from a hotter surface to a cooler airflow. That’s why Heatsinks have fans attached and we don’t.
The heatsink takes the heat away and the fan puts cool air on it and the temperature goes down. If the heatsink is clogged then all the fan is doing is “stroking the fur”. The device gets hotter. If its an Intel based computer the first you will know is that it has stopped. If its an AMD it will stop before it overheat and its hot enough to start a fire, and whats in the machine? Loads of flammable fluff.
This is a comparison of a few years ago, Intel computers slow then stop. as opposed to the smoking AMD. One reasons we don’t like AMD, there are loads more reasons but that will do for now.
So remember when you empty your vac maybe you should get your computer emptied too? It takes us around an hour to do the job properly and apply new thermal paste.
