Dusty Being the most experienced computer user in my family often means I’m the first port of call for help and advice. I get asked all sorts of questions from ‘what’s the best laptop to buy’ to ‘how does this gizmo work with my flippetyjibbet’.

This weekend I thought I had the easiest question of all when my brother-in-law queried me regarding a ‘thermal event’ that was causing his PC to shutdown on a regular and alarming basis. My first instinctive response was that the fan on his heat-sink was failing and therefore his CPU was heating up really quickly. Having a relatively new motherboard meant that the heat sensors were reporting the spike in heat and were doing the smart thing of shutting things down before the cpu turned into a molten lump.

As it turns out I was wrong – sort of. The fan was just fine but the dust build up on the heat-sink effectively cancelled out any heat dissipation causing the same effect. After clearing out all the dust and putting the case back together again he reported that the thermal events and subsequent shutting down has now stopped, not only that but the performance of the machine has increased so it appears to be good as new.

If you don’t already, it is a good idea to regularly clean out your PC to stop critical build up of dust and keep your components performing at their best. These days motherboards include all sorts of fancy features including thermal protection properties. Often you will find settings in the BIOS that will reduce power to the processor to try and aid cooling when it starts to reach set temperatures, when this happens, the whole PC will seem to slow down and perform poorly.

If you don’t feel confident opening up your PC be sure to get hold of a friend or family member who knows what they are doing. If you can’t find anyone you could use the services of your local PCWorld, though this will cost you a few quid.

The best way to dust your PC down is with a can of compressed air, these are pretty easy to get hold of but try PC world if you get stuck, I get mine from Costco in bulk packs for a couple of quid.

Remove the case from your PC and simply blow the air over the key areas – all fans and the main heat-sink. Be sure that the PC is turned off and ideally unplug it from the mains completely to save electrocuting yourself. Also if you are sensitive to dust wear a mask, if it’s not raining outside you might want to do this in the fresh air to save covering the room with the displaced dust.

When using canned air try not to shake the can about while blowing the air around as you may end up spraying the super cool liquid onto the components, use short bursts of air directed specifically at the area you are aiming for and don’t turn the can upside down. The canister will get very cold after a period of use this is normal.

Once you are done put the case back on and plug everything back in, hopefully you didn’t knock anything in the process and the PC will fire up and work as before, possibly even better.

How often you need to clean the PC out can depend on where it is placed in the room, if it sits on the floor of a carpeted room and you have pets, then it is very likely to need more regular attention than if it sits on the top of the desk and you don’t have pets. I clean mine out roughly every 3 months and it does get pretty clogged up.

So, cleaning out the dust and crud from inside your PC might just be the cheapest performance improvement next to uninstalling all those unused apps :0)