Why You Should Clean Your PC And Power Supply Especially When You Have a Shedding Animal

[SuperShermanTanker]

so I have a friend who also builds PCs and his PC stopped working and he thought his power supply broke, and he has a ca (you guys know where this is going) so he went to microcenter and bought a new power supply and I went over his house to visit and he gave me the old one which I popped off the cover and to check the capacitors (I know not to touch anything on the inside) and poof a big flat layer just covering the exhaust like a filter fell off the power supply and I immediately asked my friend for a can of compressed air and I blew out the cat hair and dust and I looked and nothing was fried and capacitors were all nice and flat on top so nothing was blown so I asked my friend if I can keep it since he was going to throw it out anyway and I brought it home hooked it up to a Acer desktop I have with a Athlon 64x2 and 8600gt and poof it works and since the machine booted with a 95 watt CPU and however power hungry a 8600gt I'm guessing imbetween 65-75 watts because of the lack of a 6pin power connector and I ran Crysis the most demanding game I can run on that machine and it still works no crash or power cut or sudden shut down. It turns out the power supply just thermally shut down to protect itself from all the cat hair and dust clogging it and it looks like now I have a nice Thermaltake power supply 500 watts too and reading the power distrobution on the side most of the power is on the 12 volt rail where most of the power is needed and the capacitors for the mains side of the power supply are LG branded so they look like good caps soooo I got a working good power supply now...

 

The machine used to test the PSU to see if it still worked:

 

[ThinkWithPortals]

Holy crap, there was only one full stop in that entire paragraph

 

This is why I clean my PC thoroughly every month.

[CookieMaster]

Pics really don't seem to show a lot of dust or hair tbh. 

 

I've got no shedding pets and 2 air purifiers in my room and everything gets dusty really quick 

[jeffmeyer5295]

Nice save man!

[SuperShermanTanker]

2 minutes ago, CookieMaster said:

Pics really don't seem to show a lot of dust or hair tbh. 

 

I've got no shedding pets and 2 air purifiers in my room and everything gets dusty really quick 

The pics were taken after it was cleaned and brought home and tested if I had pics of it when it was dusty I would have posted them but those are all the pics I have if you look carefully you might see some remnants that the air can didn't blow out

[Scruffy90]

I thankfully dont have tjat issue with my pc, but my dog hair penetrates my two desktops and laptop 

[AlwaysFSX]

Oh god that specific thermaltake power supply is horrible to begin with.

[suchamoneypit]

You take the lead for the longest run-on sentence I've seen on the forum.

 

I don't really see that much dust to , some before pics would be great. I do have cats myself, even my PC and server on a raised table, they get covered in crap pretty quick and need a thorough cleaning.

 

[CookieMaster]

1 minute ago, SuperShermanTanker said:

The pics were taken after it was cleaned and brought home and tested if I had pics of it when it was dusty I would have posted them but those are all the pics I have if you look carefully you might see some remnants that the air can didn't blow out

Ah I see, I was just assuming you where gonna post pics of before. My fault 

[VerticalDiscussions]

Cleaning is always the best option, pets or no pets :p. Even better is if it is made in a controlled environment, which usually is not available, but some folks do have i suppose.

 

Luckly, i got people that clean my computer at no charge ^^.

[SuperShermanTanker]

6 minutes ago, suchamoneypit said:

You take the lead for the longest run-on sentence I've seen on the forum.

 

I don't really see that much dust to , some before pics would be great. I do have cats myself, even my PC and server on a raised table, they get covered in crap pretty quick and need a thorough cleaning.

 

yah sorry for the run on sentence typed it quickly without checking I'll reformat it when I get a chance to sit down and look at it. My friend does clean his PC I'm just guessing he missed the power supply and luckally it did have a thermal sensor in it to shut itself off to protect itself. Also that's one reason why you buy good quality power supplys, so they have all the safety features and protections.

[SuperShermanTanker]

10 minutes ago, AlwaysFSX said:

Oh god that specific thermaltake power supply is horrible to begin with.

Really from the looks of the design and capacitors used it doesn't look too bad. I'm not a electrial engeneer or someone who knows alot about eletrical design and componentry, but one thing I can say is that it's definately not the worst power supply I have seen in terms of build quality and quality of components used.

[SuperShermanTanker]

13 minutes ago, AlwaysFSX said:

Oh god that specific thermaltake power supply is horrible to begin with.

This Apevia power supply is definately worse just look at the brand of caps used

[Ithanul]

Yep, animal hair gets inside of everything.

 

Big issue when there is two cats and a small dog inside plus living out in peanut and cotton field country area.  The amount of dust and hair gets pretty nuts.  Reason I tend to clean mine every other week.

[AlwaysFSX]

19 minutes ago, SuperShermanTanker said:

Really from the looks of the design and capacitors used it doesn't look too bad. I'm not a electrial engeneer or someone who knows alot about eletrical design and componentry, but one thing I can say is that it's definately not the worst power supply I have seen in terms of build quality and quality of components used.

Mine went to shit pretty quickly, a lot of them do too.

[SuperShermanTanker]

2 minutes ago, AlwaysFSX said:

Mine went to shit pretty quickly, a lot of them do too.

Well the specific unit I have already outlived it's 5 year warranty

[SuperShermanTanker]

1 hour ago, Abyssal Radon said:

I have a bordercolie that hangs out with me all the time and he always lays against my computer when I'm gaming or whatever. Plus, he sleeps on my bed with me so don't get me started with sheadding pets... good thing he is a good dog. One time after working out, I came home to him with his head inside of my computer since I forgot to put the side panel back on. He basically feel asleep smelling the inside of my computer... mind you guys bordercolie's shead like crazy.

At home I have a cat and he likes to come into my office and try to get my attention to pet him and I have 2 PCs in my office one that has a nice Silverstone case that has all the intakes and even the top exhaust covered with filters and the other PC being a ITX PC that I use for LAN parties and as a spare PC and the ITX one only has a dust filter on the PSU intake so the GPU and CPU heatsinks eventually build up cat hair and dust after a few weeks but my office is not that bad since my cat doesn't sleep or hang out in my office