How Dirty is Your Computer?
Posted by Jon Lee in Offtopic, Personal, tags: dirty, dust, funnyNo I don’t mean that kind of dirty… I’m talking about dust. This weekend my father called me to inform me that his computer wasn’t working. It would turn itself off after a few minutes. I quickly came to two conclusions:
- Virus
- Overheating
Like meeting an old friend
So I went over and sure enough, it was turning itself off while booting Windows 95. Now I should mention that this is a very old PC. It’s a Pentium I that runs at 150MHz and it has been running 24/7 for a little over 10 years. The reason it runs 24/7 is because bootup (Windows 95) takes way too long on such a slow machine. I’m actually very amazed that it’s still running! I figured the hard drive or power supply would have died by now. Since my father only uses it for checking email and playing solitaire, there was really no reason to upgrade it.
3 and a half inch what?
Since the computer couldn’t even boot into the operating system without shutting down, I really had no way of testing if there was a virus. I’m sure some of you old guys are saying “You could create a bootable floppy with the latest virus definitions.” Well I cannot for the life of me find a floppy drive within a 5 mile radius or even a floppy disk for that matter! Out of options, I decided to open it up to take a look.
Boy was I in for a shock. The entire innards of the computer was covered in 10 years worth of dust — and not just fine dust, it was covered in heavy duty dust bunnies. Mystery solved… it was definitely overheating since the fan was so heavy and clogged it could barely spin.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t expecting something like this so I didn’t bring my digital camera with me, but here is a picture of someone else’s computer so you get an idea of what I’m talking about:
Counterattack
I quickly armed myself with a face mask and a can of compressed air and took the computer to the garage to dust. I never realized how much fun dusting a computer with compressed air could be! The dust was flying everywhere and if it weren’t for the face mask, I would have probably increased my chances of lung cancer by a couple percentage points.
After dusting the computer out, I plugged the computer back in and it ran fine. I really don’t know why I even tried fixing it. The can of compressed air probably costs more than the computer itself. I guess maybe it’s because I had some fond memories with that computer; after all, I did write my first website on it. 
Just for fun, here are some more pictures of dusty computers I found on the web:
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