[Rant] Had to clean up the internals of the PC

A few weeks ago I posted that ASUS's fan controlling software - Fan Xpert II on Asus Maximus VI Hero - could be causing dust to pile up inside the case. I didn't see how bad the situation was, until last Friday. I got the USB 3.0 cable for the motherboard/case combo that I ordered from eBay and I wanted to install it. Since I had to route the cables behind the motherboard tray, I had to take the case out and open it up completely to do it. Only then I got a clear understanding of the amount of dust that was trapped inside. There was a looooot of dust. The source of the dust is unclear to me. We vacuum the carpet everyday and everyday there is dust! It feels as if the carpet or the wooden floor underneath is slowly dematerializing!

Anyways, I didn't want to do a proper, time consuming clean up job. Few year ago I would have done that without hesitation but not anymore. It's not that I don't have enough time. I just don't feel like doing it. 

But I knew I had to do some kind of cleaning. I started with the vacuum cleaner. It sucked up a decent amount of dust. Then with the use of a moist cloth, I could get rid of most of the dust that didn't require me to take the whole PC apart to get to. 

There's more. All this time I didn't have an optical drive nor the front hard drive bays installed in the case. It seems that when you have the optical drive installed, some of the unwanted holes get blocked and the drive bays help channel air from the outside of the case to the inside. So I installed them as well. They sure added some weight to the case. In fact, I cannot believe how heavy my PC weighs now! It must be weighing like 20kg. Or maybe the sheer size of if makes me feel that it is that heavy. Really wish I could make a mini-ITX rig. 

I didn't take photos of the cleanup system. It isn't 100% dust free anyways as I didn't take every part out when cleaning.

[Rant] Finally cleaned the G15 keyboard

Putting my vacation into good use, today I cleaned my keyboard. There were a lot of dirt trapped between the keys. This is the first time I have cleaned it since buying it second hand from my friend, Saman.

I followed this guide to disassemble the keyboard. First of all, I took photos of the layout of the keyboard. Even though the guy says he used a brush the clean the dirt, I had to use soap and wash it. There was too much dirt and most of it was stuck in there. They wouldn’t come off, even with a tooth brush. After washing the keyboard, I used a cloth to wipe off the moisture and then used the hairdryer to dry it.

How to remove the unwanted stuff in your hard drive automatically

CCleaner is a cool tool. It can remove a lot of unwanted junk from your hard drive on demand. You can choose what to remove of course.

Following is what I have chosen.

Windows settings

Application settings

You can also include specific folder to clean. For example, if you want to clean your temporary folder, you can specify it in the following page.

Now, you can clean it all on demand, or you can schedule it to do it at a specific time. You have to use the Windows Task Scheduler for that.

Note: Remember this app has other features as well.

This is how it works.

First you have to select what you want to clean, then close the program. Then you have to use the command line switch “/AUTO” when you run it. What that command line switch does is, it will run the CCleaner app in the background without opening the usual window and clean according to the options you selected last.