Thank you for that little bit of information about what happens when you reinstall Windows from scratch: nothing. I've been talking to other people with slow computers and telling them to reinstall. Apparently it's not all that helpful.
My ASUS tower needs to have it's dust blown out. It works well enough but the side panels are clear and I can see some dust bunnies in there. I'd have done it already but it needs to be taken down into the basement. I have no problems carrying all that weight on a level floor, but going down the stairs with an altered center of gravity is precarious at best. I could bring the air compressor up to the garage, but I would stir up more dust than I'm trying to clean out of the tower. Besides, I don't have a work bench in the garage.
Testy Tessa
Re: Testy Tessa
All of my computers, that get dirty anyhow, are in my garage office.
What I do when I need to blow them out, since I only have a narrow gangway from the outside door to my office door is this.
I have a box fan, it measures a little over 2 foot by 2 foot square, a common design.
I open the outside door and set the fan in the doorway blowing to outside.
I set the computer on a floor mat just inside the outside door.
Close the door to my office so dust don't get back in there again.
Use my compressed air to blow out the computer in short spurts to give the dust time to get sucked outside by the fan.
Believe it or not, the fans in my airtight office are always filled with heavy brown dust, I'm sure some of it is particulates from smoking, but my ashtray is vented to outside, so I get little smoke in here ever since I built it.
The computer at the house doesn't get the brown dust, but does get a little white dust and a lot of dog hair, hi hi.
As always, the fins over the CPU are clogged up fairly thick, which is why the computers start shutting down I guess.
On some I can pop off the fan and do a better cleaning job, but some I cannot. I've broken fan blades using the compressor, so bought a little valve to control how much air comes out. Haven't broken anything since. I also blow out the power supply and all the other exhaust fans as well.
When it looks clean, and all dust is gone from the air, I will button it back up, open my office door and switch it out for another computer.
Once they are all done, I can start connecting everything back up again. A royal pain, hi hi.
As an aside: One of the computer shops did something I always thought interesting.
When they get a used computer in that is filthy. The slip out the hard drive and optical drives, and with the case opened up, they drop the whole thing into a vat filled with cleaner, then they take it to a sink and spray it out with a water sprayer, and finally give it an air blast to dry most of it. Then it sits on a back bench for a couple of days to make sure it is nice and dry. After that they put the optical drive and hard drive back in, and fire it up.
I thought my computers were dirty inside, but you should see some of these they get into the shop.
I can understand the ones that come from places like the sand and gravel yard being dirty, or from gas stations, but from insurance and doctors offices. Where does all that dirt come from?
Heck, I've never figured out where all the dirt in my office comes from.
When I built it, I sealed it up tighter than a drum, too tight in fact.
Smoking in here ruined a lot of things and took me months to get it all clean again.
This is why I built the ashtray exhausted to outside with a place to exhale smoke into.
This made a really big difference, no more smoke stains on anything, not even white plastic in here.
My wife thinks it is from those little nearly invisible spiders, because everything in here get covered with what looks like the remains of cobwebs. Places such as the mini-blind slats always have white to tan fuzz on them. And I have this ball shaped brush I use around the ceiling where it meets the wall, because those areas always have cobwebs also.
The sad thing is, we have the perimeter of the house and part of the back yard treated by an exterminator every three months, and have since we moved in here. He has done the inside of my office a couple of times, but it made no difference. He determined I have way too many nooks crannies and cubbyholes in here for them to hide and thrive, hi hi.
What I do when I need to blow them out, since I only have a narrow gangway from the outside door to my office door is this.
I have a box fan, it measures a little over 2 foot by 2 foot square, a common design.
I open the outside door and set the fan in the doorway blowing to outside.
I set the computer on a floor mat just inside the outside door.
Close the door to my office so dust don't get back in there again.
Use my compressed air to blow out the computer in short spurts to give the dust time to get sucked outside by the fan.
Believe it or not, the fans in my airtight office are always filled with heavy brown dust, I'm sure some of it is particulates from smoking, but my ashtray is vented to outside, so I get little smoke in here ever since I built it.
The computer at the house doesn't get the brown dust, but does get a little white dust and a lot of dog hair, hi hi.
As always, the fins over the CPU are clogged up fairly thick, which is why the computers start shutting down I guess.
On some I can pop off the fan and do a better cleaning job, but some I cannot. I've broken fan blades using the compressor, so bought a little valve to control how much air comes out. Haven't broken anything since. I also blow out the power supply and all the other exhaust fans as well.
When it looks clean, and all dust is gone from the air, I will button it back up, open my office door and switch it out for another computer.
Once they are all done, I can start connecting everything back up again. A royal pain, hi hi.
As an aside: One of the computer shops did something I always thought interesting.
When they get a used computer in that is filthy. The slip out the hard drive and optical drives, and with the case opened up, they drop the whole thing into a vat filled with cleaner, then they take it to a sink and spray it out with a water sprayer, and finally give it an air blast to dry most of it. Then it sits on a back bench for a couple of days to make sure it is nice and dry. After that they put the optical drive and hard drive back in, and fire it up.
I thought my computers were dirty inside, but you should see some of these they get into the shop.
I can understand the ones that come from places like the sand and gravel yard being dirty, or from gas stations, but from insurance and doctors offices. Where does all that dirt come from?
Heck, I've never figured out where all the dirt in my office comes from.
When I built it, I sealed it up tighter than a drum, too tight in fact.
Smoking in here ruined a lot of things and took me months to get it all clean again.
This is why I built the ashtray exhausted to outside with a place to exhale smoke into.
This made a really big difference, no more smoke stains on anything, not even white plastic in here.
My wife thinks it is from those little nearly invisible spiders, because everything in here get covered with what looks like the remains of cobwebs. Places such as the mini-blind slats always have white to tan fuzz on them. And I have this ball shaped brush I use around the ceiling where it meets the wall, because those areas always have cobwebs also.
The sad thing is, we have the perimeter of the house and part of the back yard treated by an exterminator every three months, and have since we moved in here. He has done the inside of my office a couple of times, but it made no difference. He determined I have way too many nooks crannies and cubbyholes in here for them to hide and thrive, hi hi.
Re: Testy Tessa
Spraying down the office with insecticide is not enough. That might kill any critters walking around the visible surfaces, but any of their eggs are buried. When the eggs hatch a whole new crew of militant bugs emerge pooping all over your walls, ceilings, and floors, and, of course, burying their own eggs in the nooks and crannies. This can go on forever unless you interrupt the reproduction cycle. I think something like a smoke bomb would be needed to penetrate into areas that the liquid spray cannot reach. You got to know what kind of bugs you have so that you can call the exterminator out again right after their eggs hatch. Then another bomb may be necessary to eradicate any eggs missed the first time. Once the reproductive cycle is halted the next application would wipe out any critters who were lucky enough to make it through the gas attack.
Of course this strategy will only work indoors, which means it might be pointless to even try to kill all the bugs. If you can't eliminate the source, you are doomed to be bugged for the rest of your days.
Solid state electronics would survive soap and water wash with no problems. It's all those other computer parts that can absorb or trap liquids you need to be careful about. Back in the days when freon was not frowned upon we would wash all the circuit boards in a tub of liquid freon before assembling them into radios.
A friend of mine in North Carolina had to take her desktop in for repair because it was overheating and shutting down rather quickly. She popped off the cover and blew the dust out but that didn't do it. The repair shop said her power supply was infested with stink bugs. Not sure what they are, but apparently they are roaming about her house freely. I'm all for cleaning out computer components, but I think I might change professions if somebody brought in a PC full of roaches and bugs for cleaning.
Of course this strategy will only work indoors, which means it might be pointless to even try to kill all the bugs. If you can't eliminate the source, you are doomed to be bugged for the rest of your days.
Solid state electronics would survive soap and water wash with no problems. It's all those other computer parts that can absorb or trap liquids you need to be careful about. Back in the days when freon was not frowned upon we would wash all the circuit boards in a tub of liquid freon before assembling them into radios.
A friend of mine in North Carolina had to take her desktop in for repair because it was overheating and shutting down rather quickly. She popped off the cover and blew the dust out but that didn't do it. The repair shop said her power supply was infested with stink bugs. Not sure what they are, but apparently they are roaming about her house freely. I'm all for cleaning out computer components, but I think I might change professions if somebody brought in a PC full of roaches and bugs for cleaning.
Re: Testy Tessa
Before we had the floods back home, and my business office was in the basement office, I had a nice cabinet that matched my file drawer cabinet. Same height and width. It had coat hooks on the ceiling, and shelves at the bottom divided to hold reams of paper side by side, and a spare box of tractor drive paper on the highest shelf with enough room for the coats.
Back when computers laid down flat on the desktop, and the monitor sat on them, the cabinet was used for the intended purpose. After the first flood, the file cabinets lower drawers would no longer open and close because the particleboard wood swelled. But the matching coat cabinet was made of real wood, so it dried out just fine, except for the back which was particleboard.
Because of all the work I was doing in the basement, tearing down water soaked drywall and putting up new, there was white gypsum dust everywhere.
So I moved my new tower computer into the coat closet, added a furnace filter on the back bottom after I cut away the water soaked particleboard, and placed a foam filter sheet over the furnace filter, so I could pull it off and wash it often. The furnace filter was one of the expensive white pleated jobs, ten microns I think.
The ceiling of the coat closet was also particleboard and although water didn't get up there, I guess the humidity did it in too to some extent, the coat hook assembly pulled off with ease, which it shouldn't have. I had a 10 inch box fan with a handle and four feet. I removed two of the feet so the fan would slip into a hole I cut in the top without falling through. The handle was in the center and the feet on the edge, so the fan blew up but angled slightly toward the center of the room.
It held my first built-up computer for a year, then I added a second built-up computer. Those things stayed as clean as they day I bought them. I only had two problems with this set-up though. If I needed to back-up to the floppies, I had to keep the door open and go back and forth several times from my desk. The other was the wires for the monitor, keyboard, and mouse all had to have extension cables to them. My printer sat on a 2-drawer file cabinet next to the coat cabinet, and it reached OK.
Later on when I had these fancy desks made, there was a cabinet for the computer on the right, and the printer drawer on the left. Plus a junk drawer over the printer drawer. The back of the computer cabinet in the desk was fairly well open, and a pain to connect a computer up under there, but was handy with the front of the computer behind a door.
Here too I made a little wooden frame that held a small 6" round fan and a filter below it that slid down into a U-channel I made behind my desk. Did not do this on the other desk because it sat against the wall.
On the back side of my desk, the frau at the time made a royal blue curtain that hung down to hide the back of the desk and all the wires. It also caught a little dust where the intake and filter were.
I still have a couple of cans of Dem-Kote Contact Cleaner I used to use on circuit boards from pinball and video games to clean them. Worked great too! I pretty sure it was nothing more than Freon. The label doesn't say.
Considering the location of all the circuit boards in gaming machines, one wonders how on earth they get splashed up with soda or beer, they are way up inside the cabinets, no where near the controls consoles or any moving parts. Well except for one arm bandits which have moving parts that could toss liquid upward as the cams spin or the arm snaps back, but even then, they are enclosed also. So who knows. I know some of the black is from bug droppings, hi hi.
Back when computers laid down flat on the desktop, and the monitor sat on them, the cabinet was used for the intended purpose. After the first flood, the file cabinets lower drawers would no longer open and close because the particleboard wood swelled. But the matching coat cabinet was made of real wood, so it dried out just fine, except for the back which was particleboard.
Because of all the work I was doing in the basement, tearing down water soaked drywall and putting up new, there was white gypsum dust everywhere.
So I moved my new tower computer into the coat closet, added a furnace filter on the back bottom after I cut away the water soaked particleboard, and placed a foam filter sheet over the furnace filter, so I could pull it off and wash it often. The furnace filter was one of the expensive white pleated jobs, ten microns I think.
The ceiling of the coat closet was also particleboard and although water didn't get up there, I guess the humidity did it in too to some extent, the coat hook assembly pulled off with ease, which it shouldn't have. I had a 10 inch box fan with a handle and four feet. I removed two of the feet so the fan would slip into a hole I cut in the top without falling through. The handle was in the center and the feet on the edge, so the fan blew up but angled slightly toward the center of the room.
It held my first built-up computer for a year, then I added a second built-up computer. Those things stayed as clean as they day I bought them. I only had two problems with this set-up though. If I needed to back-up to the floppies, I had to keep the door open and go back and forth several times from my desk. The other was the wires for the monitor, keyboard, and mouse all had to have extension cables to them. My printer sat on a 2-drawer file cabinet next to the coat cabinet, and it reached OK.
Later on when I had these fancy desks made, there was a cabinet for the computer on the right, and the printer drawer on the left. Plus a junk drawer over the printer drawer. The back of the computer cabinet in the desk was fairly well open, and a pain to connect a computer up under there, but was handy with the front of the computer behind a door.
Here too I made a little wooden frame that held a small 6" round fan and a filter below it that slid down into a U-channel I made behind my desk. Did not do this on the other desk because it sat against the wall.
On the back side of my desk, the frau at the time made a royal blue curtain that hung down to hide the back of the desk and all the wires. It also caught a little dust where the intake and filter were.
I still have a couple of cans of Dem-Kote Contact Cleaner I used to use on circuit boards from pinball and video games to clean them. Worked great too! I pretty sure it was nothing more than Freon. The label doesn't say.
Considering the location of all the circuit boards in gaming machines, one wonders how on earth they get splashed up with soda or beer, they are way up inside the cabinets, no where near the controls consoles or any moving parts. Well except for one arm bandits which have moving parts that could toss liquid upward as the cams spin or the arm snaps back, but even then, they are enclosed also. So who knows. I know some of the black is from bug droppings, hi hi.