Cleaning Out The Home PC

I decided to clean out the home PC this weekend. The cabinet has accumulated a good amount of dust, the CPU cooling fan is clogged and the key board is filthy. I see that Bablu has left pieces of his dinner on the keyboard.

The CPU fan is the most troublesome. Dust clogs the heat sink vanes and the fan can no longer cool the chip. If CPU usage crosses 50% the fan starts screaming. The noise is quite loud and very distracting. I have had a couple of system shutdowns because of overheating. The trick is to open the case and clean out the cooling vanes with a vacuum cleaner or a brush. I use a brush and a blower to get the worst of the dust out.

I also want to give over the entire hard disk to Windows XP. I had a dual boot with EduBuntu but I don't use Linux these days. My Home Security software runs under Windows and hence the PC is always up with Windows XP. I am running out of space on the hard disk. What with home security videos, web cam snaps shots etc, I have to keep cleaning up the older surveillance records every week or so. The 30Gb currently under Linux would be nice.

Well, I must backup all the required stuff, save the basic configuration before I nuke Linux and remove the dual boot. It is going to be a busy weekend.