The Tower of Filth

Some time ago, I went on an epic cleaning spree of my room. I was vacuuming, dusting, sorting through stuff... And during the process, I also had the idea to do some computer-related tasks I'd been contemplating for a long while. So buckle in and prepare for the ride, because it's going to be quite a tale.

The first task, honestly, wasn't planned at all. I was cleaning, and decided to move an old computer tower. I hadn't really used it in ages, since I don't have much space to properly set it up. So it had been sitting on the floor, gathering dust like everything else. Decided to move it to make it easier to vacuum that section of the floor, and it was being stubborn. I just wanted to slide it out of the space it was in, so I could pick it up and move it to a more convenient location. But it simply didn't want to budge.

"What are you, welded to the floor or something? Move!"
It finally did so, and I realized my statement wasn't far from the truth. There were nasty-looking rings of black goop where it had been sitting, and when it touched the floor again after moving it forward a bit, I created two more. Apparently, the rubber feet on my computer had degraded, turning into a sticky, gooey mess.

Well, at least it's a hard floor and not carpet. I'd have to set fire to the room and start over.

So now, I had more cleaning to do than I had bargained for. In addition to getting rid of ancient dust bunnies, I now had this horrid stuff to take care of. The floor was fairly easy, and didn't take too long. The tower itself, however, was a royal pain. Only a fraction of the mess was on the floor, but the tower had the vast majority of the rubber feet left, plus the glue that held them there.

I was going to clean it with a cloth and some rubbing alcohol, but there was so much that I decided to get a scraper that Mom sometimes used for things like cleaning the inside of the oven. Removed a fair bit of rubber gunk with that. I also decided it would be better to get something disposable for scrubbing at it, rather than the cleaning cloth I had originally grabbed. Paper towels, toilet paper, even a used dryer sheet would be preferable for this mess. Just throw it directly in the trash. I'm not sure how long it took to clean the floor and computer tower, but it felt like about 40 minutes. Or maybe a hundred years.

Scrape, scrape, scrape...

For a while, I also had the idea of someday opening up that tower to clean out the dust. And remove the CMOS battery, because it had been there for over a decade and was undoubtably dead. It's responsible for keeping track of the time and date, along with BIOS settings. The last time I booted up the computer a few years prior, it was behind by about a month, so I figured the CMOS was dying. The battery has a life expectancy of 7 years, and it was 11 or 12 before starting to die, so I guess it lasted a long while, though. We won't discuss how it took another few years before I got around to doing something about it, though.

Well, that was fun. They make it sound like such an easy task. The coin battery just pops right out, easy peasy. Yeah, right. It was reluctant to do so, even when I seemed to be pressing in the right spot. Even the videos made it look effortless. Just push the battery release lever, and... why isn't this working. My brother came in and helped, and he had issues, too. Maybe it's easy if you've removed a thousand CR2032s from PCs in your lifetime. But we finally got it out, hopefully without any of the evil static every guide warns you about when touching a computer's internals. Which left the bigger task: cleaning.

Sooooo easy...

I put a TV tray outside, then set the tower down on it. Using a can of compressed air and a small cloth, I began the task. Which was rather dusty, considering the computer got several years of regular use before being retired due to lack of space for setting it up after we moved. The bottom of the case had a nice layer of dust, and the fans were rather dirty, too. I used the cloth for wiping off some of the surfaces, and the compressed air for things like fans.

The enormous Asus fan sitting atop its heatsink throne was simple enough, except for when I was using the straw that came with the compressed air can, and accidentally shot it into the heatsink. It was an odd sight, this little plastic straw protruding from the fan. Hopefully I got most of the dust out, though. It looked like there was a lever for removing things, but I didn't want to risk having issues putting it back on later.

Behold, a diagram depicting computer guts.

The rear fan, however, was another story. It's encased in a big box along with the power supply unit, so I couldn't access it as easily. Along with blasting it with air, I got a tool that looked like a long plastic wand with a bit of pipe cleaner at the end, and poked it through the rear opening to scrub at the fan blades. Some of the dust was adhered to it, so it required a bit more effort.

As I cleaned things, I also contemplated the internals before me. It looked like there was housing for another drive bay on the front of the case, beneath the CD drive. The space where the hard drive was seemed to have room for adding a second storage drive, too. And you know, for something inside the computer, which most users will never see, the hard drive was incredibly shiny. A bright silver box to house 230 GB of Ye Olde Windows Vista.

And of course, there was the motherboard with all its assorted parts, half of which I probably couldn't identify. I am not Clint Basinger, and to me, the inside of the case consists of a CD drive, a super-shiny hard drive, a collection of wires, and a motherboard with a bunch of mysterious boards and chips. Maybe this long board is RAM? And here's a forest of caps, and a little chip with an 8-bit crab thing on it. What is that from, anyway?

Apparently it's the Realtek logo.

After many moons and a ton of flying dust, I finally completed the task. Now, if I decided to use the computer some time in the future, it would be fairly clean inside. Granted, it doesn't have a CMOS battery any more, which means BIOS settings are gone, so I might have some fun configuration things to do if I boot it up again. But that's future me's problem.

Check back in a couple of weeks, when I continue my saga with an exciting story about laptops and my failure to open them.