Dell XPS 420 Maintenance

Today I decided to do some maintenance on my XPS 420 It has not been cleaned for a few months and the case has no dust filters so it gets dusty pretty fast. We have had it since it was new back in 07' and have put in new hardware along the way as we have needed too.
The specs at the moment are:

CPU: INTEL CORE 2 QUAD Q6600 @3.0ghz
GPU: ASUS GTX 760 2GB
RAM: 8GB DDR2 Kingston HyperX
PSU: Corsair CX430
SSD: Corsair 60GB
HDD: 2x Seagate 500GB

This is how it looked before I started to clean it.





I took of the front panel to see how much dust there was behind it.



It did not look to bad, so I just used a micro fibre towel to remove the little dust that hade accumelated there.
After that I used a vacuum cleaner and the micro fibre towel to remove as much dust as I could from the pc. I did not manage to remove it all because I could not reach in to all the little crevices, but it does certanly look better after the cleaning than before .




I decided to also remove the CPU heat sink to replace the thermal paste with some Arctic MX2 and to remove any dust from the area around the socket and the heat sink




If you have any questions or feedback I am happy to hear it!

Good idea! Will try it out and see how it works

Yeah seems like it

Yep that is a fan controller It's a Coolermaster Arrogate II that I got from a system that I bought on a local Facebook group It has four fan connections and you can connect four thermal probs as well to make the fans ramp up and down as the temps go up and down

Originally it was a silver color but I did not like it so I painted it black instead

Would have been cool if it was included from the factory I like having control of the fans in my builds at all times that is why I installed it

I think it is fun building in a OEM system because of all the flaws they have, it gives you problems to solve

Yeah I could never own a stock OEM machine, because it would not be stock for very long

If even that