A horror gallery of dirty PCs at The Register, with links to their previous galleries



http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/01/ventblockers_3/Not mine, but that's how Deadmau5 got his name.Worst I have ever found was a mumified dead field mouse in a customers PENTIUM 4 tower. Still not sure how the mouse got inside and obviously DIDNT find its way out.

My system that runs on a daily basis is in need of a cleaning. Its been about 15 months. Just haven't gotten can of canned air yet. Its not severe yet, but I like keeping everything dust free. The heatsink to the CPU still has adequate airflow etc, but there are deposits of fine powdery dust building up on surface mount parts on back side of video card and other locations were gravity deposits form of any particles that get sucked in and dont make their way out the exhaust fans.

I have never had a system go to the extreme of completely clogged heatsinks etc like the ones that I use to see from customers systems in which you remove the front cover and the tower has a beard consisting of human and mostly animal hair since the customers golden lab liked to sleep under the guys desk where the computer tower was located etc.

I had a wolf spider living inside my system last summer and joked to my wife who hates spiders that its keeping the computer bugs out of the system by catching and eating them. Saw him climb out of the case a couple times and climb back in. Opened side panel and found an array of webs to catch prey. EVICTED the spider and removed those webs for fear that they could get wrapped up in the fans and seize them up since they claim that a spider web is stronger than steel strand of the same diameter, and I have seen many laptops fail due to the smallest human hair getting snagged into a fan and keeping it from spinning, so while dust isnt a good thing its not as critical to remove a small amount of it as spider webs and a single strand of hair can cause a system to overheat and shutdown when the fans SNAG or seize up.Quote

...down at a Stateside non-profit repair shop, got in a machine prone to "shutdown after Windows starts". Any idea why..?