Heat.  It shortens the life of your PC. That’s why so much attention is paid to cooling your system. Fans draw air in and force it out of your PC, allowing it to flow over the chips and heat sinks in order to keep things cool.

Computer Dust. Unfortunately, the cooling fans also suck in dust – lots of dust. It clings to every electronic component in your PC and prevents air from flowing across the chips. Instead, the air flows up and over the dirt, allowing heat to build up in your PC.

The photos on the right and below show a six-month-old Core2 Duo PC used in a home office. Not much cooling going on in this PC, especially in that video card. When the owner complained that his computer kept crashing, we cleaned it and put it into a Clean-Aire™ Computer Enclosure. And it stopped crashing. Contact us today to see if can help you with any computer dust issue you may have.

You won’t find much written about computer dust and dirt. But, we’ve all known for many years what it can do to a computer. Read the article by Larry Mingus, “Computer Dust – Should you worry?” written in 1998. He put the issue in perspective many years ago.

But, what most people don’t tell you is that computer dust can be toxic. Lead, Mercury, Cadmium, Beryllium, and Fire Retardants are used in the manufacture of computers, and are highly toxic. When dust is introduced into the PC or Server, toxic chemicals attach to the dust and can be exhausted into the air.

This is why we cringe when we see YouTube videos on how to clean dirty computers. These videos show people just opening up a computer and blowing it out with compressed air – inside their home or office. No breathing mask, no dust cover, no ventilation. This is just plain irresponsible.

The proper way to clean a dirty computer is to put on a breathing mask, take the system outside and use a can of compressed air to blow the dust out. We also recommend that you use a HEPA vacuum cleaner to capture as much of the dust as possible. Remove the video card, CPU heat sink and other dirty components and dust them out separately.

But you can prevent the build-up of dust and prolong the life of your PC with Clean-Aire Computer Enclosures. Let the dust and dirt build up in the filter. Then just clean and reuse the K&N Filter. It’s that simple. But, don’t clean your filters too soon. Even with all the dirt built up on the filter shown here, air flow was not restricted.