I’ll be straight with it. I’m a smoker, I smoke inside, I have a PC that is also inside. I want to clean my PC thoroughly to buy it a few more years. I know about the q tip method, and the compressed air, and general methods of cleaning out gunk and junk from PC parts. But this boy is way too gunked up for a regular cleaning. So, I reckon, the easiest way to clean it is to dunk the dirtiest parts in a bath of isopropyl alcohol. I was considering acetone at first, but it’s way too strong of a solvent, and alcohol should be better at dissolving organic residues. Is this a good idea?
I hereby submit this query to the council, and await judgement.
As bad as your computer looks your lungs are worse.
My lungs have a self-cleaning feature, and my PC doesn’t.
Feel free to roast me for my lack of tech literacy and dumb ideas, but not my health. I have calculated everything. My body will be fine for as long as it needs to be.
You sound like my father, until he died from complications of COPD from smoking.
My lungs have a self-cleaning feature, and my PC doesn’t.
😂
Ending addictive behavior starts with admitting to yourself where your brain is lying to you about your habits and how gullible you are to accept those stories it sends you. You are not your brain.
Gotta get a lung flute. You’ll puke after you see what you cough out. Next smoke hits like a truck too
I don’t know what any of this means, but I can think of a much more effective solution for smokers.
I’d like to hear it. Does it work for other addictions?
Actually sure, if we’re going to be earnest I do recommend some tactics for beating addictive behavior.
The most important thing you will ever learn about yourself and reality itself is the sheer amount of delusion your brain puts you in, no matter who you are or how smart you think you are.
We think of our brains as logical, calculating machines inside our heads where all our will and thoughts and ideas come from, but this is an illusion, you are not your brain, you’re not even your language center. Your brain’s primary and only job is to assemble your feelings into a narrative story. That story doesn’t have to make sense, it just has to connect things so your feeling makes sense.
What this means for addictive behavior is that you can find the point where your brain starts reasoning things out that it wants, and cut it off because you know it’s not you, it’s another entity inside your head trying to get a thing it wants. Drugs fire off unnatural pleasure associations which your brain will make up a lot of excuses to keep getting, so learning to identify the stories your brain tells you to engage in behavior you don’t want is key to reducing that behavior.
A huge part of this is preparing ahead of time for when you get worn out trying to argue with yourself and setting specific boundaries for your future-self. Get rid of the stuff you want to quit taking, make sure there’s none in the house. Lock your money and credit card in a timed safe after a certain part of the day, because you will have a harder time resisting the “reasoning attack” as it gets later and later in the day, and resist the urge to think about tomorrow or how miserable you’re going to feel as the night, week and year go on. This is why they say “one day at a time” because your brain will wear you the fuck down with debate and “ideas” and bargaining, and if you anticipate that lasting on and on, you will break easier.
All of this requires being very honest with yourself and examining the habit you want to quit, such as looking up the actual risks, the actual data about dangers and the actual amount of money you’re spending on it, and all that stuff your brain really doesn’t like incorporating into it’s mental story-telling.
Understanding your brain isn’t you and it will actually be your worst enemy and will childishly sabotage your whole life to get what it wants, and that it talks to you in your own internal voice so it’s hard to resist, these ideas will be your best mental strategy for quitting because at least you have your actual enemy identified.
This answer makes me sad.
I believe you that you know more about the health impacts of smoking than non-smokers. I noticed you didn’t say it was healthy but only that your
body will be fine for as long as it needs to be.
My dad smoked from age 17 to 84. His body was fine for a long time.
However, he really suffered for the last decade between the emphysema and the cancer. The last 3 years in particular were awful.
The cancer wasn’t even that advanced when it was first diagnosed but no-one was willing to operate because of his lungs (general anaesthesia was basically a death sentence). Eventually it metastasised.
He suffered but it wasn’t killing him. I remember one particularly bad emphysema attack near the end, where he couldn’t get air, and he was literally begging to just die. Eventually he shot himself. He held out as long as he could for the sake of our family, especially his grandchildren, but he really didn’t want to die in the hospital.
I know exactly how addictive smoking is. My brothers watched my dad suffer and still they can’t quit. My dad couldn’t quit and he was the one suffering.
So, this comment is not intended as a lecture or advice or recrimination. It’s just a story about a wonderful man with a horrendous addiction. I tell it in the hope that it might be one more nudge to help you finally beat your addiction. Wishing you all the best.
Yeah, I’m reading this, and with what I’ve seen it checks out. I’m from NC and my family is as well, and the number of deaths that I attribute to smoking in my family is pretty high. Even if you don’t die, you often have issues either later in life or for the rest of your life.
70 years is more than enough for me. Not planning to spend more with my physical body.
But thanks for the story. I’ll make sure to try and remember it.
Just as a clarification. How much did he smoke a day? Was it more than up to five cigs a day? Because that is my limit and has been for years. So I could have more than 70 years in me.
It seems like we should be doing the opposite, you seem to understand tech just fine and are very ignorant about health.
I studied medicine. I have a diploma. I know nothing about the tech accept that it’s made of metal and crystals and plastic. And it has lightning in it.
Did you study it in kindergarten and nowhere else? Because whether or not your lungs are “self cleaning” or not has absolutely nothing to do with how dangerous smoking is.
Do you really want to have a discussion about that? Because I am more than happy to explain my reasoning.
The biological body has the capacity to regenerate and self clean. If you live in a place with lots of smog, that’s the equivalant of smoking cigarettes. It’s like with any harmful thing, moderation is the key. If I smoke up to 5 cigarettes a day and live in a place with little to no smog, I’m much less likely to suffer adverse effects to my lungs and throat than not smoking at all and living in a place with lots of smog.
In addition, I suspect I have some genetic immunity. My great grandfather smoked more than a pack a day for decades, and he lived to like 95 years old.
Now, about the lung self-cleaning thing. As cells divide, new cells take their place, and old cells are either metabolised by the body or shed off like skin. Inside your lungs, tissue that’s damaged by smoking can be healed, as long as it isn’t too severe. Aside from that, lungs secrete mucus when irritated, which is then expelled along with the irritant (in most cases. Things like asbestos and fiberglass just stay in there). Through this natural process, the lungs clean themselves from the inside. As long as the rate of intake of the irritant does not exceed tha capacity for the lungs to expell that irritant, the situation doesn’t get worse.
That is my reasoning. Feel free to give me your take.
Sewers are self cleaning. If you throw a pipe bomb in there it ain’t gonna matter how self cleaning it is.
I don’t really need to argue the case when there’s decades of science showing that smoking isn’t safe in any amount (including smog).
I’m not arguing withg that. I never said it’s healthy. I never said it’s safe. I just explained my personal justification for keeping this habit. It’s not AS unhealthy if you do it only moderately. Can you people stop telling me how to live my life? It’s annoying af. And has nothing to do with the question that was asked.
In theme with your analogy, what you’re doing is butting in when two people are arguing over how to clean a room and saying “have you considered not getting it dirty or not having the building there at all?”
I’m not here to condone smoking, but OP isn’t here for unsolicited advice either.
Wow at this point id more seriously consider to quit smoking or at least stop doing it inside.
You know nothing about my situation. I can’t do that. If I could I would.
Wrong.
You can. You just wont.
You are speaking with an addictive mind that is left out of control.
That is how addictions work. That’s your ‘situation’. And yea, i do know. I know enough to know when im being bullshitted. I know the bullshit language we use to convince ourselves.
You are only bullshitting yourself here. Thats the situation. Im not the one who needs to be convinced for you to continue. Because im not the one making you smoke.
Youre already taken that job on yourself. Every moment of every day. Youre chosing it.
That is your situation.
FF here.
No.
It’s fucking dumb.
Your mom will be super pissed off when you burn her house down.
Disassemble. Use distilled water and a suitable sized ultrasonic cleaner, with one component at a time. Air dry with clean compressed air, canned not compressor. Leave it to dry for atleast a day after. Reassemble, fingers crossed.
ultrasonic cleaner
Wont that destroy every soder connection in there?
Extreme case story here…
I had a fella bring his computer into our shop for diagnostics and hopefully repair after a house fire. The case was originally light grey, but it was covered outside and even inside with nasty stinking black soot and the front panel was mostly melted.
We checked it out though, the PSU had failed. So we pulled out our test PSU and tried that, and the nasty stinking computer actually booted up!
Well, the boss didn’t want to be responsible for this mess, so he told me I could take it as a side job if the customer really wanted it fixed. He already knew that I’ve successfully salvaged flood damage computers, so why not?
Anyways, I took the motherboard and expansion cards out and took them to our local car wash. I soaked the boards with tire/engine cleaner, then pressure washed the crud away with plain water. Then I used an air compressor to dry it as best as I could, and then left it on the roof of my car in the hot sun for like 4 hours.
Everything worked fine after all that, so I hooked him up with a spare computer case I had laying around to replace his nasty half melted case.
You can actually pressure wash the circuit boards as long as there’s no power (do NOT pressure wash the PSU at all!), as long as the boards are completely dry and clean before reassembling and powering it back up. Just, be careful around any sensitive parts, and do not pressure wash the CPU socket, unless you like all your precious pins bent. Also, don’t pressure wash the fans or mechanical drives or such.
This technique isn’t for the faint of heart though, and I usually only reserve such drastic measures for boards that have already failed due to spill damage, corrosion, or other extremes where the board would otherwise end up in the scrap pile.
Water only causes and issue if there’s a charge and or minerals in the water making it more conductive. Plain water is actually quite a good insulator.
I washed a drone flight controller in deionized water after a lithium battery exploded on it and it got it back up and going
This is wild because my coworker was just telling me about his parents’ desktop that was in a house fire plus all of the water from fighting the house fire. After a week of drying off it booted up without issue.
That’s cool 👍
I’d still end up cleaning it, both to avoid future corrosion, plus that soot freaking stinks!
Isopropyl alcohol and a toothbrush. Turn off power to the PC. Hold power button for a minute. Unplug and disassemble. Get one of those chemistry squirt bottles (google lab wash bottle) to put the alcohol in, squirt it on the place to clean, brush with the toothbrush. Repeat until at desired cleanliness. Then take canned air and spray out under all the parts. Allow to dry. It’s dry when you can spray under the big components and not get any alcohol out.
I used to assemble, test, repair, and clean PCBs of all shapes and sizes. That’s what we did when we had to spot clean a board after a repair.
The jankiest way I’ve cleaned a PCB was to run it through the dishwasher without detergent, then wash it down with RODI water to demineralize, then alcohol to displace the water. It works, but you gotta be damn sure that you’ve washed away any mineral deposits and given it plenty of time to dry.
