Computers need to breath you know, and the dangers of simple static

[BMC123]

Customer left in a PC the other day as it was "crashing all the time" no other info apart from that. I assumed the usual spyware/trojan/virus stuff, but while I was doing my normal checking of the BIOS settings (to make sure no young fingers had been messing around in there first) I noticed the CPU temperature to be 85 degrees and rising this was less than 2 minutes after switch on

so i naturally switched off, and went to investigate.

this is what confronted me.



what the picture does not show, is after i took the fan assembly apart, the white "fluff" was just on the surface, underneath was a thick black mess that I literally had to remove with tweezers. the heatsink itself was totally clogged with more dirt, and I spent a good 15 minutes cleaning it.

the PSU fans and the chassis fan were not as bad, but still took a bit of cleaning, and all that dirt had accumulated in just a year. (since I built the thing!)

Turns out the PC had been sitting on the floor in a bedroom that had a fluffy carpet. Once cleaned, and with a couple of gauze filters installed over the air intake grills it worked fine.... the same could not be said of the next machine that came in totally dead.



that's the motherboard power plug. part of it is still in the motherboard power surge? lightning? nope.

simple static electricity. the bloke took a normal household hoover and a paint brush and proceeded to brush out all the dust from his computer and hoover it up at the same time.

ouch.

[Tatts]

Wow! That 1st photo, very 'impressive' for the wrong reasons!

Reminds me of my 1st PC, mine looked something similar I'm ashamed to say.

Nowadays, I take the side off the PC, clean the case filter, the PSU inlet, and give the inside a good clean with compressed air.

[BMC123]

and give the inside a good clean with compressed air.

and hopefully from a can or low power outlet I saw one bloke who took his PC down to his local garage and nearly wrecked it by hitting it with their air line By the way i forgot to mention that somebody had turned off the on board BIOS CPU heat alarms on that first PC - one of the reasons i insist on pass wording the BIOS on any machine i work on..

[Tatts]

Originally Posted by BMC123

I saw one bloke who took his PC down to his local garage and nearly wrecked it by hitting it with their air line.

You mean to say there's something wrong with doing that?

Seriously though, it wouldn't surprise me, some peoples ignorance/stupidity never fails to amaze me!

I'm off for a job interview on Monday for an IT Support role, not too sure I want to do it though for the above reason!

[Zeb]

So you guys would'nt be too keen on overclocked Athlons and graphics cards even with extra fans fitted sitting on my study floor then

[Keith]

Nothing wrong with using a airline (if dry) on kit, it is where you point it and how far away you hold it that matters.

Dust is a killer and so is Fag smoke as the smoke particles are fine enough to pass through the micro filters that most Hard Disks have this reduces their life significantly.

Static has for years been the cause of all sorts of odd problem including tape drive failures as that is the part of the machine most often "zapped" by users why people still equip their comms room floors with carpet floor tiles beats me.

Years ago when I looked after micro and mini system using CDC drives etc the cost of them meant they gained far better respect. Even when we started replacing them with NCR 286 files servers with 120MB drives in them at £28,000 each they were still looked after

We all assume electronics today are very rugged and usually they are but that is a result of a lot of development work. When I was developing and building high performance power supplies for a flight computer in the Yanks Advanced Tactical Fighter we had the prototypes running in our clean rooms at such high frequencies the boards were susceptible to almost anything, static, passing equipment even the wave of an arm needless to say that was not going to be acceptable during EMC hardening but it was an interesting experiment in packaging.

I was once given a Tornado PDU (Pylon Decoder Unit) to fault find, it had inexplicably dropped a wing tank somewhere over Norfolk this turned out to be static damage to a capacitor

Static damage is a real nasty event often the fault will not occur immediately as the minute carbonised tracking caused by the static can take a while to develop to a component damaging level so in the example above the cap was probably damaged days if not weeks earlier

Today I can install an entire rack or two of Blades and return a few weeks later to find the comms room door propped open or Aircon off because it is noisy or the room used for storage. The mentality today is that they are all just PCs now. and I think failure rates often reflect operating conditions

[BMC123]

Nothing wrong with using a airline (if dry) on kit, it is where you point it and how far away you hold it that matters.

Ah but... would let a member of the public loose with an airline on their PC? I generally discourage such use, as most garage compressors are just too big to regulate properly, and they should be left to do what they do best, blow up tyres and over tighten peoples wheelnuts

[Lates]

But by crimping the air line in half to restrict the flow would prevent blowing it to bits.

[BMC123]

a bit like those garage pressure washers, crimp to reduce pressure, and the lance lands on your nice paintwork.



I stand by what I said, use a garage compressor at your own risk.