CPU Maintenance 101

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I’m not sure if I should reveal this or not, but I’ve been building my own PCs since the early Cretaceous period, or the mid 90s as some would call it. Beforehand, I was scared that I’d end up destroying a lot of expensive equipment by mishandling it, frying it with Back To The Future levels of static electricity, or just generally fucking it up somehow. That all changed when someone (quite possibly Grumpy Metal Father) helped me through upgrading the memory on a PC. With that under my belt, I realised that putting PCs together myself was not only doable, but actually kind of - gasp - fun.

Since then, every now and again, I’ve had to open up my PC or SBC of the moment to do some form of maintenance - a new hard drive here, a bit more memory there, or maybe even a new GPU when the crypto/AI bros haven’t managed to snag all the available hardware. And when I do this, the same thing happens every time.

More dust than you could ever have imagined. Fans running continuously pulling in all sorts of things - Grumpy Metal Cat fur, random shit floating through the air, human skin flakes, you name it. Obviously, nothing that a good can of compressed air or an air blaster of some sort can’t blast away. And of course, once I’ve done this, the PC runs quieter than before, so it’s definitely worth doing. But I’m never proactive about this, and it only happens when I need to adjust the hardware of the machine, which doesn’t happen that often.

While dust is one of the most obvious things that can clutter up the inside of a computer, the actual hardware itself sometimes needs some attention. One example of this is the thermal paste that sits on the CPU transferring heat to the CPU cooler. On some of my SBCs, the thermal paste has sometimes lost its effectiveness, leading to higher CPU temps overall, so removing the fan and reapplying the paste can lead to better thermal control.

Thermal Paste? That’s It?#

Of course not, don’t be daft. That isn’t what this post is about at all (although if you didn’t know you could replace your thermal paste from time to time, you’re welcome). While CPUs are important in a computer, an even more important one sits in your head. And that CPU is one that is often overlooked in our own day-to-day activities.

Last year, my own CPU lost some effectiveness, and I had something of a tough time mentally and emotionally. It was triggered, weirdly enough, by the Grumpy Metal Gerbil dying while we were on holiday in a den of black metal scenery and rain. This led to some extremely sharp words being exchanged between myself and Grumpy Metal Girl, a rare occurrence at the best of times - which these definitely weren’t.

But that wasn’t even the moment that it all came to the fore. It was just the start of a three week period where my mood sank and I found it increasingly difficult to regulate my own emotions and feelings. Eventually, Grumpy Metal Girl and I had a Very Serious Argument™, and I ended up storming out of Grumpy Manor.

It probably goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway. This kind of thing is completely unlike me. I’m normally a pretty raging ultra cool metal god-like chill kind of guy, who perhaps swears a bit too fucking much. To storm out of Casa De Grumpy in a mood like that - definitely not business as usual.

After a day or two, Grumpy Metal Girl and I reconciled in a burst of somewhat un-grumpy emotion. But that wasn’t the end of it. I was something like a zombie. Staring out of the window at nothing at all. Not particularly communicative (although some would argue that that’s no different to usual). I even tried to fire up an IDE and write some Python code, but couldn’t work out how to do a list comprehension. It was that bad.

However, one thing was very clear. Like all good server crashes, an event like this needed a post-mortem.

Just The Tip#

So how do you get to the bottom of a situation like this? Slowly. The first step was realising that the situation looked something like this:

The second step was realising that this had been coming for quite a while. A lot of different issues contributed - work, tiredness, and putting others before myself more often than was healthy. All of these are, individually and in the right proportions, good things. Well, maybe not tiredness, but that tends to be what happens when you end up trying to do too much in the 24 hours we have in our earthly rotation. The real problem is when the proportions of the normally good things end up trampling over the others.

A lot of this realisation came from the start of a therapy programme. I never thought I’d be the kind of person in therapy, and always figured that that kind of thing normally happened to people in American drama shows on the gogglebox. But nope, here I was, attending therapy once a week via the cursed mechanism of Microsoft Teams. And the crazy thing (or at least, it seemed crazy to me to start with) was that, just like Tony Soprano¹, it actually helped a lot.

Thanks to the help of a very patient psychologist, we covered what had led up to the Very Serious Argument™, and what was lurking underneath the surface. As it turns out, men - even the non-grumpy ones - tend to be kind of shit at looking after their CPUs properly. We don’t tend to power ourselves down enough, or undervolt the CPU to do less work per second, and by now, you get the general idea that I’m beating a dead analogy with a blunt feather.

Learning Some New Rules#

Looking back at the previous year or two, it started making a lot more sense. There were lots of situations where I was setting myself up to be unhappy, but then bottling everything away so that I could get on with the important things. This left little time for me to actually de-stress and focus on looking after myself properly. Both work and Grumpy Family life always came first. I rarely, if ever, took time to myself to pursue hobbies for myself. A Saturday afternoon to go and take some photos by myself? Couldn’t do that, had to do things around the house. Head out for a finely crafted ale after work? Nope, had to get back to take care of things. It was always very easy to find reasons not to do things for myself, and it always felt selfish on the rare occasions when I actually did.

A lot of the therapy sessions ended up teaching me ways to deal with things as they happened. I think it would do a disservice to the hard work that therapists and psychologists do if I attempted to describe them all here - I’d do a bad job of it, and everyone is different, and will need to find approaches that work best for them. But the ones that I learned worked bloody well.

All of a sudden, now that I was concentrating on making myself a happier and healthier person, I found that I could deal with the various things in life that piss you off at the time they happened. Dumb ass driver cutting you off in traffic? Don’t spend the next fifteen minutes of the car trip bitching and moaning about how shit they were. Someone says something that rubs you up the wrong way? Don’t assume that there’s bad intent behind it, take a deep breath, and work though it slowly and carefully.

With these simple but effective rules explained to me, all that needed to happen was practice them. So I did.

The Aftermath#

It’s no coincidence that I’m writing this in the same place that inspired my thoughts on local maxima. Over the last six months, I’ve tried to look after myself better - diet, work/life balance, and actually spending some time on my own hobbies and weird investigations that would normally be shoved aside for something more mundane. The best bit is, it’s actually working.

I was very fortunate that $COMPANY responded brilliantly when this all happened, and $BOSS made sure I got the time to look after myself. I ended up needing around six weeks away from work to get back to my usual grumpy self. Stupidly, I felt guilty the whole time away, like I was just slacking somehow. I ended up having nightmares that I’d be laid off work for not doing enough, which is apparently quite common in these situations. It was a very strange time!

I’m also very lucky to have an amazing life partner in Grumpy Metal Girl, who I couldn’t have gotten through all of this with. Black hugs to you from the bottom of my charred and frozen heart.

So, after all of that, I’m pretty much back to normal again. With all of the helpful techniques that I’ve learned, I can now get back to being myself again, Grumpy as ever, without anything hidden beneath the surface.

And if you’re reading this - make sure you look after your CPU. Your system will thank you for it later.