Agree, i would avoid the big garage compressor. They make smaller ones for purposes such as these.

I agree, don't get carried away with the air pressure. You also don't want to blow dust into anything, like your optical drives. I prefer to open them and clean Them with gentle air flow.

Of course. I treat it like a pressure washer cleaning a painted surface, you sure don't want to get close.....

Maybe if some of the members are only 8 or 10 years old. My oldest functioning Mac is a G3 running panther, and it is almost completely useless at this point.

antec 300 case and coolmaster v8 hsf. i dont have any filters :eek:

i think ive had it for about a year now i should clean it

Worked at a school last year that had new computers installed back in 1999-2000era GX series, they had not been touch nor moved until we had to overhaul them. our District required them to be stripped of the HDD and the body to be shipped back out to the main Network office for Deinventory. It was not uncommon for us to find the entire case PACKED with dust. It's amazing some of them were still running. the more interesting things we found were several rats nests, Several Dead Rats, and an oddity of a dead Squirrel. btw. Never take a air compressor to a computer unless you have a good air dryer...

Vacuuming them out is better, blasting just makes a mess and then you end up inhaling half of it.

The rest of the black goo will be found during the autopsy of said smoker. :D

I took my phone apart to find lots of dust in there (Nokia 6300). Are MacBooks just as easy to clean?

True, but usually the attachments on the vacuum are too bulky to be used in some tight spaces, so compressed air becomes necessary. Vacuum before and after though.

This is necessary on video game consoles as well! Especially the Xbox360 which is already prone to overheating.

Menards here has a vacuum attachment set that adapts doen to a 1/2 inch hose with attachments sized accordingly. for the 10 or 15 bucks they ask for it nowadays, well worth it for many vacuuming tasks, like detailing the interior !!!

I did that for roughly 80 machines for work once. With a 20mph crosswind in the middle of winter it was like ripping open a bag of flour. Gross, but it worked.

A macbook is extremely difficult to take apart properly. I'm pretty sure they don't even have any fans though, so why would you want to take it apart?

Depends on the MacBook, some are easier than others. At least some of the newer ones do have fans. I've taken a few apart, I wouldn't do it for just a cleaning.

At the BIG oil company we had computers everywhere and they all had air filters installed on them. The clean-up crew would pull the filters and run the vac hose over them while they were cleaning the carpet. This took place five days a week.

The head of our communications dept had the title of Wire Chief. The Wire Chief would hold a small class now and then on the care and feeding of communication equipment, and he pointed out that dust will not really hurt radios or computers. BUT... dust will attract water vapor and that would have a terrible effect on the equipment. The only way to keep the water vapor to a minimum was to keep the dust to a minimum.

This is also a reason not to use unfiltered compressed air. It is easy to attach an air filter with a water knock-out on the outlet of your compressor. Cheap, too. All air has water vapor in it unless you live in the middle of the Gobi, so if you are spraying your computer with untreated air you are also spraying it with small amount of water vapor.

That's why the cans of compressed air are really the best thing to use.

By the way, many of the cans of 'air' are really cans of compressed Ethane, so don't smoke when you use one of these.