Little upgrade and dust clean up for MkIV

 So I finally ordered an adapter so I could plug in my PCIE USB 3.0 adapter.  While I was in there I decided it was time for some dust clean-up too.
 Here are the Before pictures of the various fans and vents.

 The PSU filter really did a good job.

 Here is the adapter cable.  I ran out of Molex connections when I installed my 6 channel fan controller and the PCIE USB 3.0 card was powered via Molex so it sat unused until now.

 The front intake filter also did an excellent job.

 Actual dust build up on the cooling tower was minimal.

 Here are the after pictures.  I just used a brush attachment on our regular vacuum and some q-tips to loosen the stuck on dust.

 Here you can kind of see the Molex adapter going into the PCIE USB 3.0 card.  Also notice the difference on the CPU cooling tower fan compared to the picture earlier of the same fan.

I am surprised the dust build up wasn't worse.  I only have two exhaust fans on the very top so I think the theory that positive case pressure keeps the dust build-up down is true.

Some maintenence on my Laptop

My wife's windows 8 Laptop kicked the bucket a while back (big surprise, right?!)  So she has been using my Toshiba that used to be her old laptop.  I have a post up on when I first got it and replaced the screen.  Yeah, that laptop.  I'm still trying to figure out windows 7 on it because it doesn't have the right drivers for most of the hardware.  Ubuntu works great, though.  Anyway, she's been using it a lot lately for her online classes and homework and stuff and I noticed it making a clicky noise the other day when I used it for a few minutes.  I began listening intently to find the noise's location.  Luckily the sound wasn't coming from the hard drive and I decided that it must be the fan going out.  I got a new fan on order.

 It's a sturdy little 'puter.

 First step is to wake the computer and shut it down.

 Take out the battery, hard drive, and RAM cover.

 Then take out all the screws to remove the keyboard.  And carefully pull out all the wires associated with removing it.

 Now it's all apart.

 Fan seems fine from here but it sure is dirty.

 Plenty of dust caked onto the heatsink too.

 Turns out the new fan I ordered was the wrong one.  Well crud.

 Close up of the caked on dust.

That's better!

After I got it back together the rattle was worse.  So I took it back apart and found a screw rattling around under the motherboard.  So I removed it and reassembled.  The rattle was gone!  Didn't need a new fan after all.  It just needed some cleaning!

The end.