I am not a tech person, but I cleaned out my secondhand PC today, and it took hours with the sheer amount of dust accumulation. The fans were nearly overloaded with it!!
Does a clean PC run better / faster than one filled with dust? Or is it more a matter of keeping the fans running easily? Or something else…? Idk, maybe I imagined it, but it seemed to boot much faster after cleaning. Could be wishful thinking!
Yes, especially laptops. Dust leads to heat buildup, which is detrimental to performance.
This goes doubly so for laptops, as the cooling rarely has more than one flow “channel”. I open my laptop an clean it out once a year, as it runs somewhat hot even when perfectly clean.