As I wrote in a poorly recorded and really grating song 20 years ago (« The Clean Room », available on Vintage Vince, but you’ve been warned), the enemy really is dust.
My ole’ iMac G5 has always been loud under pressure. As soon as I would throw some demanding task at the poor thing, its three fans would rev up, and I just learned to live with that.
But about a month ago, once the CPU fan would rev up, it would never slow down again, no matter what.
The noise was driving me insane, and I kept shutting down the iMac, which was an inconvenient pain, because it works as the Wi-Fi gateway and router of the house. I had opened it up and blown some dust out, but nothing had changed.
A few days ago, in desperation, I opened it up once more, with the intention of calling Apple if I couldn’t figure out what was going on.
Looking at things more closely, I noticed something for the first time. There was a conduit that went from the G5 processor housing, to a fan housing, and up to a kind of chimney. Sure enough, by peeking into that chimney hole, I could catch a glimpse of the CPU fan. So this time, I blew into the chimney, and tons of dust poured out of the the grille at the opposite end of the computer. I kept blowing until no more dust was visible, and vacuumed though the hole for good measure.
Since this operation took place, the iMac has never broken a sweat, even under heavy load. Even better, it feels faster, probably because there are less wasted processor cycles due to overheating.
But what « amazes » me the most, is that the iMac has never been this consistently quiet, not even when I received it. It’s as if it was shipped from the factory with dust caked around the processor to keep it cosy during the trip from China to France.
That’s two years of mild to major aggravation, for nothing?
Sigh.