Yesterday I helped out a friend to move into his new apartment. Once we had completed moving the heavy parts he asked me if I could connect his PC and while i would do that maybe also do a quick system check.
So I connected back all the cables and powered up the machine and noticed that it was incredibly loud, but did not pay any further notice to that. I checked if the system was configured for automatic windows updates, and it was and had all the latest and greatest patches installed, so far so good. I then checked the Antivirus application, that one seemed to be expired since a while, so I uninstalled it and installed AVAST Home that is free for home users.
Then in the middle of downloading the software the system powered down unexpectedly. When moving into a new apartment, there’s always one busy with electric, so I thought maybe one had taken out the fuse, but unfortunately that wasn’t the case too.
I checked the power cable and then powered the system on, it quickly started booting, but before even showing the BIOS boot screen it would shut down again. I did wait for a few minutes and ten tried to power up the system again, and it would boot completely into Windows then. Meanwhile I had told my friend about what had happened and he told me that that would happen from time to time, so nothing special.
I continued with the previously started download, but then again after about 3 minutes the system powered down again. I thought this looks like someone who will soon have to buy a new PC :-).
But maybe it was jut the power fan that had stopped working ? So we opened the PC and found a CPU completely covered by dust. I have forgotten to take a picture myself, but it looked worse than the picture below.
So we took out the CPU and fan unit and cleaned it with a vacuum cleaner, then we did put back the CPU, attached the fan, connected it back to the motherboard and booted up the system.
First it was not as noisy anymore as before. Of course because after removing all the dust it had less work to do 🙂
Conclusion, if you have your PC at home or at work standing on the floor, it might be worth opening it from time to time and check how much dust is in there just to prevent your machine is going to look like this one…..
