I’ve been having trouble lately with my desktop crashing when I’m playing WoW. It always happens after I’ve been playing for a while, but it doesn’t matter how long my computer was on before I started up WoW. That and the fact that it produces a colorful pattern on both monitors led me to blame my video card. Updating the drivers had no effect, so now that it happened on the weekend when I wasn’t really doing anything I decided to dust the case and pull the video card.
My case isn’t oversized (at least this one isn’t) so it’s not easy to get the video card in and out, but I’m glad I went to the trouble. I also extracted a large amount of dust from the fans that were readily accessible. It’s now cleaned out as well as I could manage without taking the cooler off or getting a can of compressed air, but there’s no way of telling if that worked without spending a lot of time stressing it, so I guess I’ll go back to playing WoW.
Use a vacuum cleaner…last time I cleaned out my computers, I just used one of the attachments for the hose and held it 6-8 inches away from the innards of the computer, getting closer to the inert parts like the bottom of the case. Seemed to suck everything up pretty well, and was a whole lot easier than pulling the fans off of everything in order to manually dust it out.