I've never cleaned the inside of a PC before, but my PC really needs a cleaning as its not been cleaned in years.
Is there anyone who knows about this stuff in the Naniamo / Duncan area willing to teach another fur how to correctly clean the dust out of a computer case? All I know is that I need a can of compressed air, and debatedly a dust buster to collect the dust from the air, though many claim this can cause static.
Also I may need to replace a fan, as something in the front of my case is making a buzzing sound. I've never opened this case up, so I don't know for sure yet, but I think there's a second fan inside that has bad bearings.
Please help me furry community, you're my only hope... other than paying 60-100$ to have it done.
I'll do it for $40, but I'm in vancouver.
otherwise you'll want q-tips, two cans of compressed air (or more) some kind of long bristled brush that can be stuck into small spaces (like a small paintbrush with hard bristles) a vacuum cleaner with powerful suction and a hose, some screwdrivers, and at least two hours.
you can do it with less supplies but you wont get it as clean and it will take longer, q-tips are a must though.
$40? blast the thing, avoid the fans which are often on sensitive ball bearings, or can generate electricity with force (how motors work). Static becomes nearly irrelevant on a populated printed circuit board, especially with so many electrically conductive layers and protection diodes on sensitive packages - so at least using that will work fine.
A microfibre cloth maybe for the inside of the case, a vacuum cleaner is an absolute no-no unless maybe it is portable version.
I'd help you with it for free if you didn't live so far away from me. :\
But yeah, cleaning out a computer isn't as difficult as some people (or the internet) will make it seem. Honestly, I only ever use a single can of compressed air and have cleaned my computer multiple times with no problems. If you feel uncomfortable about cleaning a certain part inside of your computer either avoid it, or use the internet to double check if it's fine, but for the most part, dust away! Also, don't put the air right beside the things you're dusting, have a little space. :3
The buzzing sound of your fan probably does mean it has noisy bearings so you the best option there is is to buy a new fan (http://ncix.ca/ (http://ncix.ca/) they're a good place to start and are really affordable!). The problem is, if it's the fan making the noise you can't really fix it. Adding a fan to your case is really easy and if you're unsure about how to do it, there's lots of videos on YouTube. :3
Watch this video, it will give you some helpful insights on how to clean your computer
Clean The Fan (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpCJzdWxEbQ#ws)
xD
Update!
I blew out 5 capacitors on my video card, along with my fan. I replaced it with a basic NVIDIA gaming video card that runs my games fine. My hard drive is broken though, there are sections that are permanently corrupted, causing my PC to crash randomly for a night every week or so.
I'm building my own gaming PC with a friend in May. That will have 4 cores, installed so they use RAM efficiently, as per RAM itself I'm getting two 8g RAM cards. That combined with two hard drives, and a kickin CPU means I'll have a gaming rig that'll last a long time.