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maintenance - Suck or blow? What's better for dust?


The guy at the local PC hardware store told me it's better to use a small hand-held leaf blower to blow dust out of your PC case than a hand-held vacuum cleaner. Why is this? I understand that fans might be damaged if they "spin too fast", but surely this is a problem with both vacuuming and blowing dust away... I imagine both machines would generate a small amount of static to be discharged carefully, so I can't see how one would be "safer" than the other?



Answer



You can use both. Before ditching my desktop collection, I used to clean them using a six-gallon air compressor and a vacuum. Compressed air is much better at dislodging dust. As Nanne said, though, don't get your fans spinning too fast or you'll be generating current to be sent to your mobo. I usually use a finger to hold the fan in place while blasting it with air.


Anyway, unless you have a space away from where the computers normally live to clean their insides, you'll want to use a vacuum to suck up all the dust dislodged by the compressed air. Otherwise you're just going to end up with a bunch of dust in the air which the computers will pull right back into the chassis after you've powered them back on. I use short blasts of air to give the vacuum time to get the dust.


Without a vacuum, though, just use compressed air in a different, non-computer room.


Edit about the vacuum: You don't want to get it close enough to zap electronics; as others have mentioned those nozzles (plastic especially) can generate charge enough to zap things. You just want to capture the dust kicked up by the compressed air, not clean the components directly. Thanks to everyone who pointed that out.


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