Too much or too little thermal paste
If you magnify any machined flat surface
enough, it gets less and less smooth. At 1000x magnification, you would be
forgiven for mistaking the smooth surface of your cooler or processor heat
spreader for the Swiss Alps. Therefore, if you mount a cooler onto a chip
‘dry’, only a tiny proportion is in actual physical contact. Thermal paste is designed
to fill these miniscule gaps, thereby improving heat conduction. Because of
this, you don’t need a lot of paste – only enough to fill the gaps between the
surfaces.
Too much or too little thermal paste
On smaller chips, like Intel Socket 1155
models, you don’t need a lot of paste; a tiny smudge no larger than a grain of
cooked bastami rice is enough. You also don’t need to spread the paste across
the surface of the processor. Just apply it to the centre of the processor and
allow the pressure of the cooler once mounted to spread the paste for you. If
installing a larger processor like a Socket 2011 Intel Core i7, or an AMD
Phenom II, use a little more paste, around the size of a small pea. Never apply
extra thermal paste to processor if your cooler already has it pre-applied!
Working with the power on
So you’re in the middle of a download that
has taken hours so far, but you just have to install your spanking new case fan
or hard drive. Don’t do it! You may well get away with mounting a case fan
‘hot’ nine times out of ten, but eventually your luck will run out and you’ll
miss a pin, shorting out your motherboard – something that has a good chance of
permanently killing it.
The same holds true for drives,
particularly if they use Molex plugs rather than the newer SATA plugs. While
the two minutes of rebooting might seem like an inconvenience, a couple of
weeks of downtime until you’ve saved up for a replacement board is a lot worse.
Patience is truly a virtue when fiddling with PCs!
The same holds true for fitting new
hardware. If a system is turned off, you should also take the extra time to
unplug it from the mains, or at least turn the plug off at the wall. If you
don’t do this, you run the risk of accidentally having the system powering up
while you’re fitting a new addition to your system. This shouldn’t happen, but
it does on occasion and can be completely avoided by unplugging your system at
the wall before working on its interior!
Flashing the BIOS unnecessarily
BIOS setup utility
Your motherboard’s BIOS or UEFI setup
utility is not a system driver; it does not require regular updating and you
should avoid the temptation to fiddle with it unless a new release fixes a
known issue you’re experiencing. Updating the BIOS is an inherently risky
process, because if anything happens to your system during the update process,
be it a loss of power or inherent instability, the flash could fail and you
could be left with a complete unresponsive board. Flashing your BIOS therefore
shouldn’t be attempted unless it brings about a real gain – for example, if it
fixes niggling issues or has a considerable increase in performance. Simply
upgrading to the latest BIOS because it’s available really isn’t worth the
risk.
If you’re in the middle of overclocking
your system and want to try a new BIOS to improve stability, always to remember
to reset your system to settings you know to be fully stable before performing
the update. Flashing the BIOS at aggressively overclocked settings that are not
100% stable greatly increases the chances of a failure, once again rendering
your system unusable. Gone are the days when motherboard BIOS chips were
removable using a special tool – they are now stored on a ROM chip soldered
directly to the board, meaning if you experience a failed flash that you can’t
recover from, you’ll be at the mercy of your motherboard manufacturer’s
warranty terms and conditions.
