Hi all,
I have recently decided it would be a good idea to use a vacuum (black and decker corded hand vac) to get dust out of the hard to reach places inside of my PC. I have only done this on one occasion and then later read on the net that it can cause ESD to the components inside the computer. Is there anyway to tell if I have done any damage during this process? I have heard that the damage is not always immediate death of a component. I’ve been sitting here worrying that I may have messed something up in my computer that I will not know about until some months down the road. Please provide some advice. Thanks.
There’s no real test for ESD. If it’s something like RAM, then it’s usually immediate to tell. If it’s the hard drive platters that have been messed with, there may be some file corruption. This assumes, however, that the ESD generating device was close enough to actually cause damage in the first place. Some things, like optical discs won’t be effected because they don’t rely on magnetic recording methods.
Basically, I’d just run chkdsk /f from the commandline on your hard drive partitions and don’t sweat it unless something’s acting up.
Thank you for the reply, I greatly appreciate your answer.