Learn why water is bad for your system, why thermal paste is important and why a surge bar may not be enough.
Episode #10-49 released on July 26, 2020
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Today, I decided to talk about 3 things you should never expose your computer to. I will be explaining why these actions are bad for the longevity of your computer.
Starting with the most obvious, you should never expose your computer, or any other devices, to water. Water in itself is not hazardous, but the minerals within water are. Tap water is conductive and may lead to short circuits in the device, and depending on the amount of power, may lead to a potential danger of harmful or lethal shock of the user, that being yourself. If you spilled distilled water, you will be exposing your device to other dangers, such as accelerated oxidation which will severely decrease the lifespan of your computer. After a short duration though, the distilled water will have collected enough minerals from the circuit board to pose same electrical hazard as tap water, so spilling either type of water, or any liquids in general, is a bad idea.
The second thing you should never do, run a computer processor or graphics processor without thermal paste. I am over simplifying this, there are many parts that use heat sinks with either thermal paste or thermal pads and that depends on the component, too, but it is important to explain why we use such methods, and that is to enable efficient thermal transfer. Now, it might be easier to explain why thermal paste is important by explaining how easy it is for someone to get hypothermia. You see, during my lifeguard training when I was a teenager, my instructor explained that our core body temperature is going to fall faster when we are in water or in contact with metal. Why? Because water and metals are far superior thermal conductors than air. Yes, air can conduct thermal transfer, but it is a much better insulator, which is why many double paned windows use air and not water or metal as an insulator. Where does thermal paste come into play? Well, it removes the air and is a better conductor than air for heat. What we are trying to do is cause the temperature of the processor to drop and the best way to do that is to get rid of any possible insulators in the process, air included.
The third thing you should never do is simple, never plug your computer into the wall directly. You should, at minimum, use a surge arrest bar to plug your computer into the wall. You should probably invest in a UPS for your computer, if it does not have its own battery, like a laptop would. While a power surge will likely destroy any device, making most devices with complicated circuits especially fragile, a brown out, a term used to explain a lower than typical power availability, will cause more damage over a prolonged period because it may affect cooling in computers which can overheat or damage components, prevent the proper storage of data, etc. Basically, a power surge is bad, a blackout is definitely bad, but a less than ideal amount of power can, also, significantly damage your computer.
Host : Steve Smith | Music : | Editor : Steve Smith | Producer : Zed Axis Dot Net