Hanging...

You know, occasionally your pc might froze up. what do we normally do? Check taskbar, check running program... still nothing, press hardware reset. Reboot back to PC.. done. But when it happened for 3 - 5 times consistently, u know something's not right.

Seek my fren's help, installed speedfan - a program to monitor various PC component's status such as temperature, fan speed, hdd health, etc. Saw my motherboard's speed hitting 60C! There's even a 'burning' icon beside the temperature. hmmm, let's see.. burning icon shouldn't be a good thing rite?? burn = nah ah! seeing that might be the fan's problem... could be malfunctioning, I decided to shutdown my pc. unplugged all cables, brought it to washing area.

Opened up the casing, use a duster to remove off those dusts. Let's see, I'm ashame to say that I haven't open up the casing and dust off those dirts ever since I bought the casing like... 2 years ago?

One of the sponge behind the grill

LOL, I removed the front panel, remove the grills, saw there's sponge like thing which filters off incoming dusts to prevent them from entering the interior. I knew it would be dirty, but nothing could prepare me for what I'm about to discover, a THICK layer of dust! layer after layer of the grill, each of them as thick as the previous ones.

The back of the front cover

As I clean each of them off, I thought this might be the reason that caused the heat to shoot up to 60C. Think of it like this, the fan sucks outside air into the casing to cool the internal parts and circuits. As dusts are collected from the sponge in the front grill where the air intake was coming, they eventually obstruct airflow and thus things are 'heating up' inside there.

Dusts removed from front grill... a word to describe -> YUCK

It's like a party!... After I cleaned those sponge, I found that it's hard to stick them back into the grill as the grill has some part which kinda holds it in place via its curved bended edge. I found it very hard to stuff the edges of the sponge into those curve spots and eventually decided to discard them.

Dusts from internal parts... not that much, but still

This way airflow would be better considering the fact that the holes are bigger but one thing is, more dusts will be sucked inside. Well, I'll just have to be much more hardworking from now onwards, I should unplug and clean it every 2 or 3 months from now onwards. Hahaha...

Now a quick check, temperature drops to 41C - 43C! It really makes a difference! hahaha, I might need to change the CPU fan also, to keep it cooler...

So, when was the last time you cleaned your CPU casing? ; ) I think I'm not the only lazy one here.