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How to turn an old "junk" PC into a nice workstation

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shmokes:


--- Quote from: spystyle on November 06, 2006, 01:33:25 pm ---Truely,

I vacuum them with a 1" tube connected to a regular home vacuum

--- End quote ---

Don't you run some serious static electricity issues doing this?

spystyle:

Never had a problem, never noted any static, the tube is plastic, which leads down a plastic flexible tube connecting to the vacuum which has a steel turbine inside that spins and creates the suction - why would that produce static electricity?

shmokes:

http://www.pcmech.com/show/troubleshoot/827/

Here's an article entitled: Destroy Your Computer in 7 Easy Steps.

One whole section is dedicated to vacuum cleaners.


--- Quote ---
Ah, yes, the vacuum.  A great tool for cleaning your house, but not your computer.  I decided that when I was working on my computer that it would be a good idea to clean it while I had it out of the case.  I pulled out my vacuum, flipped the switch, and inevitably doomed my computer.

While vacuums may work fine for cleaning the case, and may get the dust out of all the nooks and crannies of your motherboard, they are very dangerous. Vacuums can cause a great amount of static electricity (the bad stuff we learned about earlier).  This could shock your computer and destroy the circuits.  In addition to that danger, there is another risk.  Unless you have very small attachments for your vacuum, the hoses and nozzles are very big and clumsy.  You could easily knock a capacitor loose or break it off.  This would cause major problems.  While this might be less likely to happen than the static shock, it is still a concern.

Don't worry, though, there are other ways to clean your computer.  If you are wanting to remove the dust from the small places in your motherboard (or any other small places in the computer), feel free to use canned air.  Canned air provides a very low risk of static shock and is also less clumsy.  Canned air can be found at an office supply like Office Max or Best Buy.  It is fairly inexpensive at about 6 USD a can (they go a long way if used sparingly).  I highly suggest using canned air as opposed to vacuums.


--- End quote ---

For what it's worth I have fried a motherboard by touching it without grounding myself to the case.  I'd worked on so many computers I just got careless.  The inside of the case lit up for a split second and the computer never turned on again.  Not a vacuum, but I've seen ESD in action.

spystyle:

Thanks for the link Shmokes, but I did not read it (maybe later)

I am an uncertified PC tech of nearly 10 years, no matter who writes what - the vacuum cleaner I use with it's extension tube does not kill PCs

What does? In my experience bad PSU - I test every PSU that comes through my workshop (I fix peoples computers almost weekly) and I find that to be the major killer. I find bad PSU often and it makes the computer act anomalous. I tell them to use good surge protectors (nothing labeled "temporary tap" on the bottom)

Another recent problem I've seen is "PC chips" motherboards that go bad, I'm becoming curious if they are a poor brand.

Cheers,
Craig

edit : OK I read his blurb about the vacuum - he makes it sound like we all rub a shop vac hose *against* the motherboard and suck capacitors and jumpers off the PCB - duh! I place the tube a few millimeters away from the parts. Also he says vacuums create a ton of static? I don't know what vacuum he is using my mine certainly does not. It's all plastic with a steel turbine at the end, how would that create loads of static?

edit2 : Well I don't know the dynamics of a vacuum cleaner in relation to ESD (I'm not a vacuum cleaner physicists) but I did google this up:

http://www.keysan.com/ksu1713.htm

It's a vacuum cleaner that does not produce ESD. That would imply that some do. Perhaps by chance I have a vacuum cleaner with similar properties? I tell you, I've vacuumed about 100 PCs with mine. It's the "Kirby Tech Drive G 5"

I never would have thought in a million years I'd be posting the model # of my vacuum cleaner in the BYOAC message boards! This is very funny :)

ChadTower:


I must ground myself accidentally all the time or something.  I have worked on hundreds of PCs without any thought to static... used a vacuum on a large % of them... never wore a wrist strap or any discharge device and I've never static fried anything.  What I have done is given myself plenty of jolts working on a machine plugged into a nongrounded outlet.  That often times will cause the metal chassis to carry juice and if you have a path to ground in your body, zzzzap.  Some miracle that I have never shorted that current to a component either.

I have done other dumb things like using a boot floppy to create partitions... taking the disk out, performing a couple more operations, then putting the disk back in to find it not reading properly.  Swap out the disk drive, same thing.  Go buy a third, same thing... only to finally discover that the sealed box I was putting the floppies on contained large unshielded speakers.

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