Now I am not a cat hater. Quite the opposite. I currently have two, and my girlfriend has two as well. What happens is our precious kitties like to hop onto the top of my desktop and sleep (or judge me) while I am working or gaming. What happens is the fur (cats shed, nothing can be done about it) gets into the system and over time can cause overheating or short-circuit issues. While I love my cats. I do keep them from hopping onto the top of the system.
Now for the other contaminants in the air in your home. There is also dust and other things that float around your house that when your system is on, the fans will also be on, and will be pulling those aforementioned contaminants into your system.
There is a great solution to this. If you blow your system out once a month, this will prevent overheating and what is known as "bridging", which happens when a piece of debris covers two different connections on the motherboard (or mainboard for you Mac guys) and causes a short, which will completely kill the motherboard and cause a whole host of issues.
Now I am not going to tell you to get a big shop sized air compressor. I am going to tell you to get a small one. There are two reasons for this. 1) buying cans of air every time gets expensive 2) The propellant that is used in these cans coat the components and can attract more dust particles and cause the aforementioned bridging.
So take some time in your weekend, blow out the dust in your system, and pet your kitty every chance you get (just keep him off the computer!)
Until next time-
Mike
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