You can't dust-proof a PC with kitchen-grade plastic food wrap Welcome again to On-Call, our Friday feature in which fellow Reg readers share memories of jobs that went wrong. This week reader “DW” shares a tale that we hope isn't an April 1 joke, because he says the events below were reported to him by colleagues. He sent us his tale a while back, so hopefully we're not the butt of a …
I'd think that filters fitted in front of all openings in the casing (and in front of the fans) should normally do the trick. Of course, you're in for some filter maintenance then - and I'll wager that engineers are not too good at that either.
But at least the PC won't melt down so fast.
People sell sealed box, ip-rated, heat sink only no fans jobs for truly industrial applications. They cost a fortune and the spec isn't great, but they come with ip rated connectors for everything and can be configured with sensible cards for industrial applications (rs485 outputs or whatever).
To make them even more expensive you can have them certified for use on the railways and add GPS cards. They will however survive Armageddon (and have the option to be battery powered).
I'd think that filters fitted in front of all openings in the casing (and in front of the fans) should normally do the trick.
Problem is that in many (most?) PCs the fans are mounted to suck air out of the case, so the entry is via all the little cracks around CD drives, memory card slots, etc. Filtering input air there is almost impossible. I think you'd need to have a fan that pulled air into the box through an easily-changed filter, to have much hope of success.
If you have lots of standard PCs for office type work in a fixed location, it might be a good idea to set up a positive air pressure area that was fed from a filtered air supply. In the HVAC industry there are massive numbers of different fans, filters, etc that could be used for this purpose.
Then again, for simple use, it might be cheaper to regard the PC as a 'wear-out' consumable and have data stored on LAN drives that are well protected.
I dust proofed my tower years ago as I got annoyed with my GFX card being covered in dust and slowing down. You just need positive air pressure to stop the dust getting in through all the gaps, push more clean air into the tower than can get out easily. (Remember the breaking bad episode with the fly and Walter creates positive air pressure in the cooking room to make it into a clean room?)
The fan blowing air in should have a filter in front of it. I got mine on eBuyer I think for a couple of quid. Of course you need to clean the filter every so often, at home that's once a year, at a building site it'd probably be more frequent. A quick vacuum from the outside does the job, you could even tell the cleaner to do it, it's pretty fool proof.
" A quick vacuum from the outside does the job, you could even tell the cleaner to do it, it's pretty fool proof."
Except the cleaner is 100% guaranteed to either
a) crash computer by pulling plug to power industrial vacuum machine
or (slightly smarter facility hygene operative)
b) plug industrial vacuum machine* into empty socket next to computer, thus tripping circuit
*floor polishers are also good for this, as we discovered by correlating our regular teaching PC lab failures with the caretakers weekly rounds...
"The fan blowing air in should have a filter in front of it. I got mine on eBuyer I think for a couple of quid"
Hmm, that'll teach me to be such a cheapskate. I bought my fan for a dollar on eBay.
I cried, bitterly when my one packed up in less than two years. The motor still worked, but the lube didn't.
"sounds like my ex-wifes reason for giving up on sex"
You should have tried what I did:
In the five weeks or so it took for the replacement fan to arrive from China I found that if I drizzled a little canola oil into the old fan, as a kind of lube, it would work fine for a couple of days before gradually becoming more noisy then seizing up again.
Pro tip: canola oil doth not a good lube make (for fans). Other oils may perform differently; YMMV.
"I think you'd need to have a fan that pulled air into the box through an easily-changed filter, to have much hope of success."
That's how I "bodged" of a fix for a customer who was on the verge of having his maintenance contract tripled in price or being told to bog off. The problem was that the office was in a workshop unit making garden statues/models/frogs/gnomes etc. Very, very dusty and the office PC (yes, just the one, we're talking MS-DOS days here!) had a tape drive in it that used an optical sensor and hole in the tape to mark the end. Cue dust on the sensor and tape ripped of the end of the spool pretty much every month, which was how long it survived after cleaning.
The "bodge" was to open up the PSU, reverse the polarity of the electron flow and now the fan sucks instead of blows! I suggested that they now try to source a filter for the air "inlet", meantime, stick a sheet of toilet tissue over it and the suction will hold it in place, not forgetting to replace it every morning. The contract ran out about 7 months later and I only ever went back once in that time for an unrelated fault. They were still placing a sheet of bog roll over the fan inlet every day.
On the subject of filters, I recently stumbled across this company, which apparently does only dust filters for computers:
http://www.demcifilter.com/c3/Filters-for-your-computer.aspx
I've ordered 2 for my gaming machine, and they're absolutely top-notch ! Only problem is they ship from South-Africa which cost arms and legs.
This post has been deleted by its author
"not curious enough to type 'dust proof pc' into the Googles?"
You got a plus vote from me for that.
However, I fully understand the negs (3 for you currently) because of your ill chosen use of the word 'Googles'
Unfortunately it's probably too late for you to replace 'Googles' with 'Ducks' to appease all of the privacy invasion hating commentards that inhabit this offbeat corner of teh interwebs.
@Mycho, but not curious enough to type 'dust proof pc' into the Googles?
Nope, not that curious.
Though I did take the advantage of a dull Friday to eyeball a few work PC innards just to be sure. Couldn't believe how shiny they were, must be doing something better than at home.
> the normal trick for dustproofing
Keeping it in a dustproofed area is the only guarantee.
Failing that, a room or section of room with something simple like net curtains at the doorway is enough to stop plaster (top quality fine dust) floating through and coating everything - though don't use too small a space for your dust-free zone (e.g. the space under a desk) as the this is enough to restrict the external airflow and put the temperature up by 10-20 degrees and in an already-warm environment that might be all it needs.
Assuming you can't add an intake fan with a replaceable filter.
What's the normal trick for dustproofing a computer?
Well taking my cue from the article (ie. cheap and using components that are readily obtainable in most high streets) and assuming the computer is more of a i7/Xeon workstation than a fanless all-in-one...
The first thing is to get rid of the external fans and filters! as these will get clogged unless regularly maintained. So what you need is to install the computer inside a sealed box with a refrigeration system and a container of silica gel - a bit like an old water cooled mainframe...
So the DIY approach is potentially an old freezer with some modifications to facilitate cooling... Obviously, even here the cooling panels will attract dust and hence require periodic cleaning - which can be done with a broom....
More seriously (ie. you have micro/SMB clients who actually want to use computers in 'challenging' environments where the air contains dust, solvents, grease and other grime but aren't prepared to pay the full costs of a proper solution), there is a market in secondhand rack cabinets which, if you have a van and so are able to collect, you can pick up the "professional" version of the above for a small fraction of the price of buying new.
Back in the day of newsgroups there was a rather noisy one I lurked on once in a while. It was very east coast US oriented which made it rather boring for someone in Blighty.
Still there was one thread where someone suggested that they could weatherproof their PC by filling it with closed cell foam. There were some jokes about how it could double up as a lifejacket but I never heard how quickly it cooked itself.
But, he knew about computers ! He had one !
And that is why that line never works. The moral of the story is more like : only people recognized for knowing about computers by people who know about computers should be allowed to order computers.
And the second moral is : only suppliers who already have dust-proof computers that actually work should be allowed to sell dust-proof computers.
But the line about the lowest bidder is totally true in PC equipment. When I buy a component to upgrade my PC, I buy the best I can afford, I don't skimp on the price. If I can't afford it, I won't buy it. Of course, that does mean I might have to wait a bit.
I was once in a taxi in Madras which broke down because the owner had cleverly wrapped the dynamo (yes, dynamo) in a plastic bag to keep the water out in the monsoon period, and the bag had melted onto the dynamo.
With me in the taxi was a director of Ashok Leyland. He was highly amused. The driver was not.
In a previous job I was called to the steel warehouse in a factory as the screen of the terminal there was apparently unreadable and dark.
I went down to the floor past all the welders, presses and grinders making vehicle component and arrived at the stores. The poor guy could not allocate stock or order jobs from his screen.
Diagnosis: Step 1 Adjust brightness to little effect which is unusual. Step 2 A quick (and subsequently regretted) wipe with a forefinger revealed the hellish glare of the full amber screen brightness languishing under a very thick layer of steel dust/rust. The screen, the terminal box, and basically everything in the area was covered in a thick layer. If this had been a PC with a fan it would have been nicely shorting itself out long ago...
We thoroughly cleaned the right hand half of the screen and suggested that the team there provided themselves a (relatively) clean cloth to wipe the screen with on occasion.
There was also a very nice, burn-in of the login screen on the display where full brightness of a static image had been for uncounted hours of service.
@AC
Reminds me of the time I offered to fix the CCTV system of the small shop across the road. Can't remember the fault, but I do remember that I fired up the monitor on my workbench and was surprised to see a pretty good image of the off-licence. It was so clear that it had me looking for unseen inputs for about 10 seconds until I realised it was screen burn.
@Niall Mac Caughey; The CRT monitor connected to my boss's old CCTV system had screen burn that was identifiably the shop interior the camera had been pointed at even when turned off- but yours sounds like a pretty extreme case.
Around 10 or more years ago I bought a budget compilation of classic Atari arcade games for the PC. One of them was an authentic-as-possible rendition of the classic wireframe Asteroids, and it included the option to set it as a screensaver. (Remember when people used to get excited about novelty screensavers?)
When you remember what screen savers were actually meant to do originally- i.e. protect the screen from burn-in- this struck me as hugely ironic; the design of Asteroids (bright, sharp-edged text appearing located at fixed positions) meant that at least one machine I saw in the late 80s had really obvious screen burn.
Granted, the PC was running a raster scan CRT that was only emulating the appearance of the original machine's vector scan and probably wouldn't have been as bright. Plus, by that point, screensavers seemed to be more prized for their novelty/fad value than their original use. Monitors were much cheaper by that point (early-2000s) anyway, so I guess it wasn't that big a deal.
I guess the passing of the fad and the fact that everyone uses LCD monitors nowadays (which don't really suffer from screen burn in the same way) explains why I can't remember the last time anyone really gave a damn about screensavers.
Nowadays your PC or laptop does "screen saving" by turning off, more or less. Or by turning everything off. It's a standard feature and it saves electricity.
You can however set the display to stay on, for applications where the device needs to keep running while not being touched.
The screen saver or lock screen mainly reminds you that you haven't actually turned the PC off.
Had to clean a computer used at for site-work at Sellafield. When the case was opened there was a thick layer of grime on the motherboard, deep enough to grow vegetables, if it didn't contain so much metal.
The only reason the motherboard hadn't shorted was that the Sellafield dirt was sitting on the dried mud from a previous site. As it was, the 386 happily chugged along regardless.
"As it was, the 386 happily chugged along regardless."
The 386 was a very good little processor. So was the PowerPC, which went on to power a lot of printers. We had one Lexmark which failed due to a borked cpu fan; instead I glued a small heatsink on the processor with a little silver loaded epoxy and it worked just fine.
Sellafield dirt on the motherboard
Did you have good ECC memory and hardened processors?
I could imagine that there are places where PCs become serious hazmat material after some time, covered in nicotine or relatives of black mayonnaise.
from the early days of a computer in every business of how a small, traditional, pizza company / Italian diner had 'modernised' with a ZX Spectrum that ran the accounts, stock control and provided recipes. It sat on a shelf at the back of the kitchen. But spinning dough in the air inevitably led to the odd pizza base flying off and ending up flung into some corner or other until the kitchen was cleaned down at the end of the day. Yep. Cooked pizza, but the computer survived to print another invoice.
I don't know. I assume it was home written, probably some kind of computer studies O-level or A-level project. Load once from a micro drive, leave it running, enter the bills at the end of the day to see what menu items are most popular etc. The Spectrum was king of the home brew.
i installed pcs pentiums ii and iii's into pizza shops. the flour covered the motherboards and smelled like bread. as long as they were left on the fans kept spinning. the shops were warm and dry so it never congealed onto fans and jammed them.
also had a 386 in a machine shop office above work floor in early 90s. they kept blowing due to fine metal dust from work shop that found it's way up to high office and into power supply. we eventually put the base unit in a pair of tights with a hole cut into leg which hung over the floppy drive. never gave trouble after that. wouldn't work with an air cooled pc though... looked silly but it worked.
I worked for a train maintenance firm for a while, some of their on-site support calls were interesting to say the least.
Wanging a 90m cat5 cable over the roof struts of Ramsgate repair shed to connect two pcs together was a particualr highlight. Nerf guns have never been the same since
I should take a picture of the system I built like that. I took about 30 1U server boards (Old Dell PE-1850 boards), used a bunch of 2 inch motherboard standoffs to link them together and dunked them into a 50 gallon fish tank full of mineral oil. The tank was originally designed for cold-water fish so had a big cooling rod built into it (got it surplus from the local NOAA / Oceanic Research lab).
The monstrosity was used to house a compute cluster for research lab. They didn't have space for a dedicated server closet and everything in lab had to be explosion-resistant, so the servers were dunked into the tank along with a pair of 48-port switches with fiber GBICs to communicate with the outside world
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