Routine computer maintenance.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I just thought I'd start a little thread for people to discuss what te subject line might mean.

The reason being I was chasing down some unrelated issues when I noticed some 'reduce CPU speed - over temperature' messages in the log files.

Since SWMBO was out dog-walking, the chance to power down and open the case was taken. Sheesh. The finned CPU heatsink was solid fluff. I tried vacuuming, but no joy, and lacking and airline all I could think off was a household paintbrush.

That did get into all the nooks an crannies and I was able to clean the filters and the fans and the heatsinks (one PSU fan and grille, one CPU fan and finned heatsink, one GPU fan abnd heatsink ) and tip the crud out onto the floor, where SWMBO didnt notice it next time she vacuumed..

I dunno if the machine is faster, but the warnings have gone..and its quieter too.

Another thing I do on the server, is monitor it for internal disk errors.

However a word of caution. When a drive started making bad noises on the server, it showed nothing. The disk died irrecoverably a week later. It was fortunately only the backup disk, so a simple 1:1 replacement lead to no data loss at all.

teh final tutrine thing is to clean te compoutercase externally and songe eberything down with a slightly damp cloth.

You may also want to replace mice and keyboards periodically as they do suffer death - although mice are generally better now they aren't trackball.

Finally, some computers with onboard batteries benfit from a new one after 5-10 years, and I would say that 5 years is the limit for a hard disk drive too. Yes, they may last longer, but that is when the chance of catastrophic failure starts to rise steeply. Motherboards have been usasble up to 10 yearas IME, and I only replace them whn I can get more performance for less or the same money - that used to be three years, notw it's well over 5..CPU development has it seems slowed substantially, with all the effort going into either servers with millions of cores, or portable devices using lower power.

Feel free to add any other things you consider are useful under the general heading.

I've left out software upgrades, because these days most people do those on a regular basis as they become avaliable, esp,.. if they are using Linux.

I've left out backups as well, because those have been extensively discussed before.

Suffice to say that irreplaceable data should be held in at least three places if possible on at least two machines one of which if you REALLY want to survive a house fire etc, ought not to be in the same house..

[Adrian]

If you can't be arsed to expend the slightest effort on writing your posts, why should the rest of us be arsed to expend any on reading them?

[The Natural Philosopher]

just f*ck off.

[Jethro_uk]

Many years ago, I got a "Memorex Telex" PC from a surplus sell off. It had an EISA bus, and the RTC chip from TI had an inbuilt battery.

After a few months, went to boot it, and the hard disk was "missing". A quick check revealed that the CMOS settings had been lost. The RTC chip battery had died.

After much phoning and faxing, I found a supplier in Brum (I lived in London) who wholesaled the chip. A train journey and bottle of whisky later (they couldn't do retail sales) and I got a new chip. Unsoldered old one, put a socket in, put new chip in and ... nothing. Machine wouldn't boot. Turned out the chip came "off" and needed an I/O poke to activate it. Managed to staighten pins on old chip. Put it in. Booted. Pulled it out while machine was live. Put new chip in, and a couple of debug instructions and I managed to activate the chip.

Turned out the reason the machines were "surplus" is that there were shedloads that had "died". If the internet had been around, I would have made a fortune repairing them.

Haven't seen many chips with batterys built in recently ;)

[John Rumm]

I had one the other day where one of the complaints was its very "noisy". I was expecting a failing fan with noisy bearings. What I found was an AMD fan on a Athlon 6000+ 3GHz chip that was just exceptionally powerful when on full speed (we are talking hair drier loud here). It was running in temperature sensitive mode - so once the machine was up to around 50% CPU loading it was screaming at you.

Speedfan showed that it was running in the high 40s when unloaded and was pushing up into the 75 deg C+ ranges when loaded.

I took the whole cooler off the CPU and blew it clean with an airline, but also noticed it had a dry contact with the CPU - there may have been some form of conductive pad there at one point but there was not much in evidence now. Gave it a good blob of thermal paste, and reassembled.

Retesting showed unloaded temperatures back down to the mid 20s, and peak rising to mid 50s. Much quieter!

[Lee]

At least you can easily clean the fans and sinks on a desktop, some laptops are not so straightforward ;)

[newshound]

I was recently prompted to do a major fluff clear-out by the noise when the fan ramped up. Also replaced the CPU thermal compound.

[The Natural Philosopher]

replacing thermal comopund is one to note, and I reckon its worth doing.

[John Rumm]

Well to be fair they are easy enough to clean once you can get to them! Getting there however is not always straightforward.

[Cash]

TNP,

I regularly clean the innards of several computers in the household using on of those small air-pumps used to inflate plastic paddling pools etc for the grand-kids and purchased for that grand sum of around a fiver from Aldi's and beats spending a fiver or more a time for canned air. Getting rid of the dust build-up greatly removes the cause of heat build-up inside the case which can be a great 'killer' of some of the components.

I a have also made some flexible attachments using small bore tube inserted into the air pump nozzle to get into some of the more inaccessible places - along with a small, clean good-quality 1" paint brush to remove any gunge that has hardened.

I do that little job about twice a year and that keeps everything spic and span and occasionally getting rid of the odd whine cause by dust sticking to the CPU and PSU fans.

If I'm really in a workish mood, during the cleaning period I will also remove and re-seat the memory and connectors to the discs, motherboard, optical drives, graphic and sound cards (removes the possibility of 'heat creep').

As for the outside of the case, I simply wipe over with a dry rag as part of the above cleaning process.

Some will agree and others disagree with my cleaning procedure, but I still have fifteen year-old computer running as sweet as a nut with only minimal replacement of parts (battery and a couple of cables) - which I use to test any new Application Downloads first.

Cash.

[meow2222]

This is crude but normally works well enough: put a domestic hoover snout to the air in & outlets alternately repeatedly, 20 times. It sure saves time.

NT

[Brian Gaff]

He is obviously using one of those nearly dead keyboards he was talking about. actually the sighted do not spot errors the way we blind do as they see what they expect to see. One other thing of course is that not everyone is so pedantic as yourself.. grin.

Brian

[The Natural Philosopher]

Half th problem is the 'low energy' lightbulb conveniently situated so the keybaord is in permanent shadow.

[Bob Eager]

I clean all of them out annually. Probably a hangover from the maintenance on our mainframes years ago, when they did regular vacuuming.

Usually the slidey feet fall off but I have a pack of replacements!

Yup. Do that.

My rule is 50,000 hours.

Yup. Two on different floors of the house, and one in my work office.

[Bob Eager]

Only ever changed one keyboard. They are all Model Ms.

[Graham.]

They were called "Dallas chips"

[Jethro_uk]

DING ! The company was Dallas, not Texas Instruments ....

Easy mistake after 20+ years ;)

[Chris Bartram]

I remember those, on an EISA 486 Acer.

Found this innovative solution when I just googled to remind myself about them:

[Martin Brown]

It isn't quite regular maintenance but the PSU capacitors on some boards do fail by going overpressure and take on rakish angles after a while. The failure mode typically showing up as ram faults and mysterious BSOD failures with no theme in common.

It is possible to swap these capacitors for similar high ripple types if you have a steady hand and a fairly beefy soldering iron after a motherboard has become totally unreliable. Running a Linux memory tester from a bootable CD is a good way to test for such faults.

(*) You should try removing and reseating the memory first to eliminate a single block having gone bad. Ditto for the video card although that usually shows more obvious symptoms like no picture and beeps at bootup.

And preferably on some different media types since it is possible your precious written data disk is only readable on a particular drive.

[Bob Eager]

DS1287 mostly.