Cleaning and itching

Saturday evening and I'm trying to get the last bits of paper off the office floor and into file folders/the waste basket/the recyle bin/the shredder box. I'm having a continual itching in my eyes and the back of my nose from the dust on rug.

The allergic reaction is actually more in response to some repair work I did today on the #1 computer. I've been having a serious problem with overheating and thermal shutdowns. Finally peeling the cooling fan off the top of the CPU's aluminum cooling fins, I discovered a solid mat of dust and lint, which prevented any air from getting in to the chip at all. After some wrestling with the chip and the fan to get it back in, I restarted the computer and ran the temperature monitor. Sublime success! The temperature was 25C degrees cooler than what it's been running at. I should be just fine from now on.

I've not put the side of the case back on yet, though. I want to see how it does for a few days just to make sure. And I'm awaiting the arrival of a PCI card that will give me another 4 SATA slots, which will let me add another two 500GB hard drives to this computer. (Yes, that's going to be a ton o' hard disks.) But that's a task that will wait until after I return from the STC conference in Minneapolis.

Cleaning and itching