Old Weird Ward
Unless otherwise noted, that which is posted here is opinion, which is protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution. If you don't like my opinions, go somewhere else. Nobody is forcing you to actually read this drivel.
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Sunday, November 28, 2004
- - - - - Other Sunday Activities - - - - -
Part of today was taken up by cleaning the dust devils and collywobbles out of one of my computers.
A good dust clean-out should be done about every six months or so. The leading cause of electronic component failure in PCs is the coating of dust that tends to gather on things like the CPU, or on the memory chips. Dust acts as an insulator, keeping the heat in, instead of letting it dissipate.
Snowbell, a 1.7G Celeron, hasn't been cleaned in at least a year. She's given good and faithful service, and has been my main machine for two years.
When I took Snowbell out to the garage and took off the side panel, I expected to find mass quantities of dust and grunge - but she was surprisingly clean, considering that she lives on the floor.
So, I removed all the wires from the mother-board (Note to OWW: note on a Post-It the locations of the obscure wires - like the USB connectors!), removed the CD/RW drive, and the hard-disk, and the mother-board, and the power supply.
I used the ShopVac to clean out the case, which had mostly a fine coating of dust. I then fired up the can of compressed air ($3.97 at WalMart, YMMV) and blew the dust off the mother-board, hard-disk, floppy drive, and CD/RW. I did NOT remove the heatsink from the processor - not required as there was hardly any dust at all.
So far, elapsed time: 20 minutes.
Now to put this thing back together.
Mother-board back in case, with screws in place and tight: 10 minutes
From top to bottom - CD/RW, hard-disk, floppy drive: 10 minutes
Power supply mounted to case: 3 minutes
So far, elapsed time: 23 minutes
Power supply connections to mother-board and drives, and data cables from drives to motherboard: 10 minutes because I was routing cables very carefully, and using nylon cable ties to gather stuff in an orderly manner.
So far, elapsed time 33 minutes. Not bad, Ward!
Power switch to mother-board connector, reset switch to mother-board connector, HDD led to mother-board connector, power LED to mother board connector: 5 minutes.
So far, elapsed time 38 minutes.
The front side of my Antec case has connectors for USB. The wires are labeled +5V, +VDD, -VDD, Grnd. There's two sets of these wires. They are indvidual connectors, not gathered together into one connector. The USB block on the mother-board is not labeled as to what wire goes where.
Oh, shucks. And other comments.
Into the office to find the mother-board booklet. The fabulous Intel 845GBV booklet is nowhere to be found.
Oh, foo. And other comments.
But wait! I have a CD for that Intel mother-board...and YES! The CD has a PDF file with the manual for the mother-board!
Search for info in the PDF file about the USB header on mother-board: 25 minutes. Refer to Note To Self above. Grrr...
Attach USB wires to USB header: 1 minute
Button up case, connect Snowbell back up to power, LAN, etc, and power up: 5 minutes.
Total elapsed time: 1 Hr 9 Mins.
Which should have only taken about 45 minutes, and for which I charge my customers $20.
Have you ever noticed that you take a lot better care of other folks' stuff than you do of your own stuff?
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