How Often do you clean your playout computer

[DJ Garybaldy]

I went to put Tech Monkey's PC into hibernation earlier and had a quick look inside and there was lots of dust on the CPU fan despite the tower being covered in dust filters.

Anyhow it got me wondering How often do you generally service/clean your playout machines?.

The tower I use for browsing from hasn't been cleaned since last year I'm expecting that to be just as rancid.

I'm Going to have to be a bit more thorough with the new PC make sure that gets cleaned monthly.

If you have any tips when it comes to servicing a computer I'd like to hear them.

[PROducer]

I had a dirty video card take me down a few months ago.  So it will be cleaned every few months from now on.

[DJ Garybaldy]

Well i dragged my machine out to clean it earlier and i was right it was slightly rank hoover made short work of most of the dust..

Somehow between shutting the computer down and firing it back up again something went badly wrong.

Apache2 & VMware just do not want to run & I can't remember how I repaired VMWare last time it hiccuped I thought I'd bookmarked the page but I hadn't.

Long and short of it tomorrow I'm going to upgrade it again from scratch.  3rd time in as many months Ubuntu studio has required a complete reinstall... it pains me.

[DJ Garybaldy]

I've had enough of Linux screwing me over going back to winodws as my main PC .

Something has gone badly wrong and I can't install shizzle! Even after a complete fresh reinstall. It was great when Tech Monkey was here to be able to sort Linux issues but SIGH!


I've tried leraning the basics of Linux just some things are beyond my programming capabilities.

At leats with Windows I know what I am doing.

[FreerunMedia]

Well because my computer has see through casing, i can see how much dust is collected in the dustcollector.  So when it's a little too much for my likings, i shut it down. Clean it all and run some updates if i want or need and start all up again. My computer has also the back vent blowing on full blast so it's not controlled. It's pulling air through the front blowing out of the back. That works also for keeping it pretty cool.

One tip i can give is don't put it on the floor. Putting your computer a little higher of the ground will result in less dust in the vents. Another thing and that is for the people who has air conditionened rooms, try to create over pressure. That way the dust in the room will be blown out because of the overpressure, keeping your computer a lot cleaner.

[wrm]

Off topic but on the off chance you'd find this interesting .....

Apache webserver got it's name because in its infancy there were many, many "patches" applied to fix things. And the name stuck. It's a very robust system. I used to run a few copies under various Unix flavors over the years.