Freecasts

It slows your computer to a crawl. It makes your computer’s components work harder. It is platform androgynous, affecting Windows computers, Macs, Linux boxes, Unix Boxes, and BSD boxes (Yes I know that some hardcore geeks will say that some of the last 3 are the same, I know, but that history confuses me so separate they will remain.) In fact, you are probably infected right now. There will never be a software patch for it, and yet it costs little to fix. What am I talking about? The latest piece of spyware or the latest virus? No, I am talking about dust. I was hit hard recently by a dust “attack” on a semi new PC I got. But like all my blog posts, there is some backstory here.
At school, I am the defacto computer geek. If you are having problems with your computer or just want it to go faster, you come to Charles. It was because of this reason that I was approached to do a data transfer from a PC to a new MacBook. I got there and was thanked because they were going to throw out the PC. I offered to take it because while it is old, the specs were ok. (2.8 GHZ Pentium 4 with hyper-threading, 80 gig drive, and easily upgradeable ram.) I turned it on and much to my surprise, it was emitting a loud noise. If you want to know what it sounded like, imagine this: 100 iMac G5s all running at full speed with their fans running on high speed. It was that loud. Also it was full of crap. It had: AOL IM, AIM, AOL toolbar for IE, the AOL browser, Norton Anti Virus, Real Player, and more. I decided that the weird noise was from some piece of spyware that had gotten installed. I got rid of all the junk, ran a spyware and virus check, and was greeted by lots and lots of noise. Then I had an idea. The sound sounded like there was something trapped in the fan. So I opened the case and unscrewed the CPU cooler, and the internal fan was covered in dust. In the end I pulled out about four tablespoons just from that one fan. After cleaning out the fan and heat sink , I popped the fan back on to the heatsink, turned the PC on, and heard only the slight humming of the hard drive with the whisper of the fan to accompany it. Not to mention it was faster as well. This dust experience was rather sobering because I like to keep my computers running fast (my PowerBook g3 has it’s maintenance programs run so often, it is faster than some of my classmates’ MacBooks) and I never paid that much attention to dust. Next weekend, I am pulling the fans out of all my computers and giving them a good cleaning.