PM sent. Thanks!
Heh.
I don’t know about anyone else, but it annoys the shit out of me when someone says not to do something (like buying compressed air from office supply stores), but never give an example of what to look for or even where to begin looking. Doesn’t even give a product or brand name to begin a search for. How does that help anyone?
2tb is huge, but the difference in cost between that and a 1tb is pretty minor, less than $30 here.
If you start doing video as well, 1tb can get small awfully quickly, particularly if you shoot raw. I have 1tb on my laptop and have to store older years of my pics and videos on a NAS for that reason. Annnny day now Im going to clean it up, but its nice to have the space in the meantime.
Otara
a small portable air compressor with a water/oil trap on the air outlet line would work fine.
the cans of “compressed air” you find in office supply places works OK for a bit. see, it’s not “air” at all, but a can of R-134a refrigerant. the reason it only works OK for a bit is because as you use it, the liquid refrigerant in the can cools way down, dropping the pressure inside the can. you have to stop and let it warm back up frequently.
Anti-static the whole place, and then get a compressed air source, and you can blast out most of the dust. Sorry, an air compressor from Harbor Freight with lines that don’t conduct static.
Start out with that.
Some computer shops will clean your system and basically give it the equivalent of a 50K Mile tune-up. There’s a shop near where I live that was able to clean the interior of my wife’s aging laptop, replace the thermal compound on the processor, do a spyware/malware/antivirus check and get it back to her within a week for something like $50. Gave her computer a new lease on life.
That said, if you do this, I would talk to them first and find out what all they do as part of it. If you don’t want them getting into your system (which they can do with distressing ease even with a login password, depending on your system), you might want to make that clear with them up front just to avoid confusion.
Of course, if you want a new computer and this is as good a reason as any to get one, by all means, get a new computer. 
I just did a ton of research recently when building my own rig. The overwhelming opinion was that liquid cooling is almost entirely for show unless you’re doing something ridiculous. I bought me a Coolermater Hyper 212 Evo and :::Checks RealTemp::: am sitting about 33*C at the moment. The 212 Evo was the overwhelming choice for most of the builders I talked to.
Fluid cooling comes in a number of guises. The self-build kits which cool CPU and GPU aren’t your cup of tea, but you can get sealed units like the Corsair H60/80/100; Antec also do some. These generally keep your PC cooler and quieter, and are smaller and more transportable. Intel now sells their own as a standard add-on for its higher end CPUs, and since it’s not stated, I’m guessing that that’s the one supplied with that PC. These devices have been used in computers for years and are nothing to worry about.
I’m going to ditch the whole liquid-cooled notion, I think. So now I just need to figure out which PC to buy that will give me some years of service and performance.
Indeed, my laptop can overheat even on a simple wooden desk if it’s under a heavy load. My ultra-cheap solution was simply to put a couple of rocks under the back two corners, allowing better air flow.
I use one of those cheap laptop cooling stands. They don’t always last that long, although the current one has been going for six months or more.
I’ve seen laptop stands that have a little built-in fan, but honestly anything that elevates your computer should work. I’ve seen metal mesh stands for sale that do nothing but lift the laptop an inch off the desk (and angle it forward slightly since some folks prefer that for typing.) My wife prefers to place a book under the back edge of hers.
So I’ll bump this once in case anybody has some strong recommendations for a non-Dell desktop that will meet my criteria and actually last longer than three years. Otherwise, that Microtel (non-liquid) is looking like a strong contender.
Also, I’m really not up to snuff on monitors. I need one that will give me outstanding resolution for photo work, probably in the 21-23" range.
I’m curious, is there a reason why you don’t want the dell? I mean unless you want to overclock or something. I’m a serious power user and in the past years I’ve found dell computers to be more then reliable.
You care about color reproduction, not so much resolution.
In that case, you need to buy an IPS monitor at the very least. IPS monitors give you accurate color reproduction (at the cost of fast monitor response time 5ms is kinda typical as opposed to 1-2ms for TN) I’m not a artist, so I don’t really care about color reproduction, but the dell U2410 is supposed to have crazy wide color reproduction ability. The Dell u2412 is also supposed to be nice, but not as good as the u2410. It’s 200$ cheaper though. The computer I linked you earlier comes with a u2412. I own both these monitors and personally like the u2412 slightly better, but they’re both outright gorgeous compared to everything else I’ve ever owned.
If you’re stuck in the 21-23" range, then the entire ultrasharp line are all IPS monitors I believe.
Failing that, I don’t know of other brands which are consistently IPS. So you should do your research to make sure you get one.
I’m sure I’m hopelessly out of date on Dell, but I grew to hate the noisy, dysfunctional bastards when I was in the workplace. Granted, this was 5-10 years ago. They used to put the USB ports behind a top-hinged panel on the front of the computer, next to the floor. It didn’t open past about 2/3, so in order to plug something in, one had to get down on hands and knees. The fans were loud, and in some cases actually banged up against the tower housing. These days, I see that Dell gets fairly consistently high reviews, but I’m leery. Perhaps I’ll read up some more, since I’ve been just skipping over their products.
Thanks for the monitor advice: that’s very useful.
If you do equip your PC with more fans, be sure your power supply is up to it first. That’s the boxy thing inside the PC case where the electrical connection from the wall socket goes into via power cord. From the power supply, all your PC’s components receive their metered power at the appropriate voltage. Most home PC’s come with wimpy power supplies.
On another front, I myself do have a bit of a similar issue: my graphics adapter tends to run hot: 39C normally but sometimes up to 44C just browsing. When I’m playing graphics-intensive games like Civilization V, it goes up to 59C or even higher. That does concern me a bit, because it can get hot here in the summer where I live. The graphics adapter (Nvidia GTX 560/ 2GB) has its own fan but I think I’m going to have to add another case fan to cool the entire outer shell of the graphics adapter to ensure the heat is carried off effectively.
Fans consume a negligible amount of power - like around a Watt. Most PC power supplies can deliver hundreds of Watts.
The biggest problem I’ve ever had with power supplies was the cords not being long enough to reach everything on the motherboard. For some explanation, most computers, for some reason, seem to have the power supply in the top of the case (making the computer nice and top heavy since that is also where all the hard drives and optical drives are invariably stored, but then again, I’ve never had a computer tip over either so it seems to work in the end). I switched out my computer case at one point for a heavier-duty (and cooler-looking) case that mounted the power supply on the bottom of the case, and suddenly could not plug everything in with the existing power unit. Had to drop a c-note on another power supply with longer cords.
Really though, if you buy a pre-packaged computer, the power supply will obviously have at least long enough cords to reach everything inside the case.
As far as Dell machines go, I used to own a Dell Dimension that had some… unique design characteristics that I learned to hate. Such as the awkward plastic clamshell case that I could not fully open without disconnecting the cords connecting the motherboard (on one side of the shell) to the disk drives (on the other side of the shell), or the cheap plastic clip holding the add-on cards down in place of actual screws, and the aforementioned awkward USB placement (this was before USB was the wonder-plug that it is known as now though, so it is slightly more understandable that they might hide the plugs, not knowing exactly what to do with them).
That said, All of the Dell towers I’ve seen for sale lately appear to have a fairly typical metal box case, with plugs on the front and the back. You can get USB hubs designed to mount in empty disk drive bays (an adaptor for a 5.25" bay may be required if your case does not have a 3.5" floppy drive bay in the front). They are secured in the open bay in the front of the case, and connect via cables to the motherboard either via a USB header on the case itself, or via one of the PCI or PCI-E slots where you would normally add sound cards, video cards, etc. I doubt you will have much need for that sort of thing though, unless you find yourself plugging and unplugging USB devices all the time and your case is seriously lacking in plugs.