Re: CPU - Burning Smell
Thanks turnip of false info yet again.
Forget basicly everything turnip said.
I have no idea how your fan and heatsink are added to your PC. But those have been put there so those can be taken off. There are few methods. On old CPUs they used "lift" or lever that was put from one cide of heatsing and CPU over heatsink to other. Newer method is to use screws / plastick pins that goes in to motherboard from 4 sides.
As i bet your using old CPU and standard heatsink it most likely means such things as thermal cement are meaningless. Ofc you can go to comp shop and buy some silver etc cement for it, but i wouldnt bother.
Just open your box, get lots of light, think slowly, dont do anything unless you have thought it out, dont panic. Theres nothing you can break without enormeous force. So as long as you keep your head cool and think before you do, take 5 mins break and think it again. You will find a way to get heatsink out. Its not rocket science.
If you can get your fan unscred from heatsink, and then just hoover what you can out of heatsink it should be enought. Then clean that fan and screw it back to its place. Hoover what dust you can get out of your system and your system should be some 10 times better than it was before. You dont need to clean your system bit to bit, just take most of the dust you can away. If you want to be more presise you can buy like maxi said air in can and use that to burst rest of the dust out.
Most likely the harm is allready done. The dust has allready got to bearings of your fans, so those are so to say useless. You should take one and walk to comp shop and buy new one like that, replace it and be set. Basicly save what you can and use as long as you can, some day your comp will broke up anyways. All you can do now is to give it some artificial respiration... it may last year or 10 years depending on how hard you will work on it. But its time will eventually come. Just try to lengthen it as far as possible.
Forget what people scare you about static electricity. I built my first comp form the cratch when i was 12 years old and had never heard of such thing, I have built numerous of comps since that and never been worried. Its just lots of bollocks. Theres no need to worry about such. Just remember to take power cable off every time you touch inside of your comp and thats it. If you want to be carefull, after taking power cable off touch anything metallic struckture of your casing inside your computer. If you wanna be extra extra carefull keep touching something metallic inside your computer while you touch other parts. And if you want to be insanely carefull get some discharge bracelet. My advices are from person(s) whom work as computer engineer and as army communications officer so i bet they have something real behind of em. (one knows how to build radios and stuff from scratch and one has been working with computers for some 20 years.)
Electric disharge means simply that your directing electricity from one source to another, humans cant carry that much electricity and comps are not that sensitive to it honestly, so as long as you remember not to bring more electricity to your comp (power cable) you should be fine in 10000000000000 cases of 100000000000001.
