Imagine that you have an older computer that is used as a file server or dedicated rooter and firewall. A typical server, firewall or router should be on-line 24/7 so, after a time, you will notice that said computer is anything but silent. If you wonder what happened, here is a list of possible answers: unbalanced coolers, coolers filled up with dust, or just plain old and tired.

Of course, if you keep that server somewhere where it doesn't bother you if it's loud, you can always find that your desktop coolers (and I mean coolers, gone are the days of a single cooler mounted on the CPU, now we have coolers for just about everything) are in need of some silencing. One could disable some of them, getting in response a quieter but sometimes much hotter computer. But there are coolers that just have to work (go ahead and disable your CPU cooler just to see what happens!) and they'd better work silently.

Once upon a time, I had a real piece of junk motherboard and the Northbridge cooler was not loud, it was running at an insane level, and on top of that, it had little cute vibrations all over it. So I had about three choices: buy a new cooler, disable the faulty one or try and fix it. I could always buy a new cooler, it is really cheap, only about $3, but I wanted to cut the time involved in going out and looking for a compatible cooler. Or, I could just disable the cooler, but I am not a big supporter of that solution either. The only choice left was to try and fix it. Here is what I did: first of all, you'd better be sure that your computer is off-line and all that, then you should very carefully remove every bit of dust from the cooler and while you're at it a nice, general system-wide dusting sounds good too.

Then, you should look for a tiny hole on top of the cooler (it should be covered with a sticker) and now you can remove it carefully or just puncture it with a needle or something. The next step is to pour a few drops of oil (I used sun-flower oil, this guy used olive oil) into the cooler's inner parts, while rotating it slowly. Don't worry if some of the oil comes back up, just wipe it clean, wait a few minutes for it to settle down and mount it back where it belongs. And that's about it.

As I was previously saying, this guy used olive oil to grease his CPU cooler and now he is very happy with the result. It could be better to use olive oil instead of sunflower oil as I did, or you could buy some oil designed for this kind of jobs, but unless you plan to grease a lot of coolers it is not worth the money you have to spend on it. Another trick someone could use is to submerge the entire computer (well, in fact a computer without a case and optical drives) in oil, practically removing the need for coolers.