Well, that blows

Malaysia is a tropical country. Computers are like dust magnets. In a tropical country the ambient temperature is murder to a very clean computer, let alone a dirty one that has poor air-flow.

I had noticed that the pc temperatures had started to climb up a little bit. I have been planning to get something to help clean the dust out from the computer. You can not wash it, of course, so most people use compressed air to blow the dust out.

Now, this being a tropical place, you might think that it would be easy to find pc cleaning tools. It is not. Instead, do it yourself is seldom done here, so the tools needed to do that sort of thing are almost impossible to find. Almost NO ONE here cleans a computer. They wait until it dies and then replace it, wondering the whole time, "What happened?"

I decided that I need to do something about it. I went to ACE Hardware (an American hardware store chain that has several locations here in Malaysia. I looked everywhere in the store and found nothing that would help until I was about to leave. Then I spotted something that might work. A work-bench blower. I looked at it and decided it would do the trick, but did not buy it. I wanted to look at other options first.

What I really wanted was an air compressor. No one seems to sell them here though. Apparently that is just too specialized to find just anywhere.

So we went to Tesco. There I found a shop vacuum that I thought might do the trick. It can vacuum wet and dry and more importantly it can also blow. Shop vacuums are usually pretty powerful. It also had some attachment tools, including a crevice tool. That did it for me. This gave me a blower, a multi-purpose vacuum and the crevice tool to increase the air pressure to near the speeds that I would have with an air compressor.

I brought it home and cleaned the pc out carefully. Do not let the fans spin unless you disconnected them, they are generators if they spin and that can cause damage to the pc!

Now the pc temperature is back to where I want it. This computer runs about 8-10 degrees Celsius over ambient temperature. That is not bad at all. If I were in a cooler climate this would be one cold machine.

So, now I can clean my computer more easily and I have a tool that can help clean up potential messed made by our soon-to-be-born child.