The new year is nearly here, and the break over the Christmas holidays is the perfect time to do a little cleaning on your games machines, peripherals, and even your games themselves. If you want a trouble-free and more hygienic year of gaming, you should spend a little time between Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve giving your gaming equipment some tender loving care. Here are some top tips for preparing your gaming equipment for another great year of gaming.
Winter Cleaning Regime
The holiday break is the perfect time to give your games, peripherals, and machines a jolly good clean to get them ready for the new year. This can be as simple as giving your pads, keyboard, and mouse a thorough wipe and digging out bits of dirt from their nooks and crannies, or you can give some of your gaming devices a deeper clean.
It is a good time to give some of your gaming bits and pieces an upgrade or buy something new with money left over from Christmas. Serious gamers are naming their pads and peripherals these days, like a musician names their instrument or a knight names their sword.
Custom pads often come with naming options, even Microsoft offers the service if you have a custom Xbox pad made. If you are struggling to think of a good name for your pad, check out this generator for fantasy names. You can come up with an awesome name for your gaming battle axe with a little help from this awesome random fantasy name generator.
Clean Inside And Out
At least once a year it is a good idea to give your console, personal computer, and smartphone a good clean inside and out. You will be surprised at how much dirt, grease, and goodness knows what else accumulates in the creases and crevices of a gaming machine. The cooling fans should be a top priority. These get clogged with dust quickly, and if they are performing poorly it could be damaging the precious chipsets inside your machine.
The best tool for this job is a vacuum cleaner. Use the tube or hose of your vacuum cleaner with the brush attachment to gently agitate and suck away the clumps of dust and hair that gather around the vents of your fans. If you are a PC user and feel comfortable opening up your rig, you can use this same method to clean your internal fans.
Pay special, but careful attention to the fan and heatsink that service your CPU. Getting the dust and dirt out of this area can give you a performance boost as the chip will not get as hot anymore, which causes it to ‘throttle back’ its power. Dust acts like insulation and makes your CPU hotter if you do not give it the regular cleaning it needs.
Take Care Of The Little Details
There are a few other things you can do to get yourself set up and prepared for a new year of gaming. For a start, think about power. More specifically, think about battery power. If you have wireless devices like joypads, keyboards, and a mouse, then you should think about upgrading your batteries for the new year and the other years to come.
This is a great tip for console gamers who play on the Xbox, PlayStation, or Nintendo Switch. The batteries inside your pads and controllers are probably due for an update. Most manufacturers ship their games machines without batteries, or with disposable ones. This is to try and tempt you into spending more on a couple of rechargeable battery packs. These are great investments, but the technology that underpins them has gone through a couple of evolutions over the years.
The chances are you have a Nickel-Metal Hydride (Ni-MH) battery. These are a lot cheaper, but have their drawbacks. If you want to game for longer and keep up-to-date with the latest tech, have a search online for a Li-ion or Lithium Ion battery. These use the same chemistry as the battery in a smartphone, and last a lot longer and charge a lot quicker.
Making this simple upgrade adds hours of uninterrupted play time to your day. You should be able to find lithium-ion battery packs specifically designed for your system and its controllers, but for added versatility, you should look for AA rechargeable Li-ion batteries. This means you can swap them between systems and use them for other applications too, like your TV remote if you need to.
Keep your games and gaming equipment clean. It is not only better for the look of your keyboard, mouse, and pads, it is more hygienic too. Once-a-year cleaning is the absolute minimum, don’t be afraid of adding a summer cleaning session to keep your gaming equipment looking and feeling its best all year around.