Dirty PC of the Day

Kor said:
Gotta be a smoker, that's fucking horrific.
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I didn't see any evidence of that, as a 17-year ex-smoker myself, I can vaguely remember back when my entire computers, keyboards, CRTs, etc. had to cleaned of their acquired yellowed tints (tar & nicotine residues) every 4-6 months...;) (I can laugh about it now.) Uggggh. The one thing the residue did not do, however (which after looking at these photos I consider a small blessing in those days), was act as a dust sink.

More like, gotta be a slob, I think...;) I have this image in my mind, probably all wrong, of a "big fat slob", for some reason, for whom the act of opening his case once a year to check for dust build up was just "too hard." The dust build-up is so ludicrous that the only other possibility here is that these are fakes...as in some dust-like substance was imported onto these apparently fairly old computer parts. That could account for the poor quality of the photos--but so could the "slob" theory.

You decide.
 
Dell's wonderful case layout + not knowing you need to clean the INSIDE of a computer = fuzz.

Seriously, those heat sinks are basically filters to prevent any internal dust from ever making it out of there again.
 
dergreg said:
Dell's wonderful case layout + not knowing you need to clean the INSIDE of a computer = fuzz.

Seriously, those heat sinks are basically filters to prevent any internal dust from ever making it out of there again.
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Agreed. But honestly, I've been working with and building boxes professionally and personally for almost 30 years now, and I have never seen dust like that...;) Evah...;) My cases at home do have to be cleaned periodically--and there is a definite dust accrual that occurs with daily use, but I've never seen it that bad. Not even close. We aren't looking at "fuzz" here....are we? "Fuzz" I know--and this isn't it.

Really, how can someone be intelligent enough to operate a computer but ignorant enough not to ever open the case at least occasionally--this is years of neglect--if not at least to replace/upgrade a component? I'll certainly concede, as well, that this could be true of an old office computer somewhere, that was used regularly but otherwise completely neglected. And yeah, Dell case designs stink to high heaven! It's as if Dell went out of its way to deviate from accepted industry standards like ATX just to keep its customers hostage (what do I mean "as if"? That's what Dell deliberately does.) I think that has hurt Dell to no small degree in the last few years. (Hasn't mattered to me, though, as my last personal OEM purchase was in 1995 from Micron. Too easy to build my own--and the improvement in quality is near astronomical!)
 
WaltC said:
Agreed. But honestly, I've been working with and building boxes professionally and personally for almost 30 years now, and I have never seen dust like that...;) Evah...;) My cases at home do have to be cleaned periodically--and there is a definite dust accrual that occurs with daily use, but I've never seen it that bad. Not even close. We aren't looking at "fuzz" here....are we? "Fuzz" I know--and this isn't it.

Really, how can someone be intelligent enough to operate a computer but ignorant enough not to ever open the case at least occasionally--this is years of neglect--if not at least to replace/upgrade a component? I'll certainly concede, as well, that this could be true of an old office computer somewhere, that was used regularly but otherwise completely neglected. And yeah, Dell case designs stink to high heaven! It's as if Dell went out of its way to deviate from accepted industry standards like ATX just to keep its customers hostage (what do I mean "as if"? That's what Dell deliberately does.) I think that has hurt Dell to no small degree in the last few years. (Hasn't mattered to me, though, as my last personal OEM purchase was in 1995 from Micron. Too easy to build my own--and the improvement in quality is near astronomical!)
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Yeah, that thing was a Showtime Rotisserie. Set it and forget it. That happened an awful lot to the Dimension line of PCs, and even more so to the Optiplex series.

Desktop PCs will never be from an OEM for me. I think the last non-custom we had was a Packard Bell 486 DX2 66MHz, and even that was a statistical outlier. I think my family got it for free from somebody.

My wife and I do, however, love our XPS 18. It could use some GPU, but whatever. I've got that to spare elsewhere.

I'd still take a Dell over an HP in corporate environments, and those are, realistically, the only choices if you need a quick turnaround for repair/replacement components.
 
I mean, did they TRY to see how much dust they could cram in there? That's the most taboo case I've ever seen.........holy sheeeit.
 
At least it wasn't a smokers PC, you will need rubber gloves and a respirator to work on that god awful POS...Unless you like sticky tarred up hands, and smell like a dive bar, for the next couple of days.
 
It was his daughter's PC for a few years until she gave it to them. They had it for a year or two then it started acting up. After I vacuumed it, brushed it, vacuumed again, reapplied thermal paste, it booted up fine. I cleaned Windows up a little and gave it back to them good as new. It's a wonder how much PCs can take.
 
I thought I had seen some nasty PC's in my day! Wow.
Never seen anything so caked. One time I was fixing one of those Dell cases where there is no CPU fan but a plastic duct fan from the side door of the case. When I popped the duct open a giant chunk of hair/dust/dirt in a compact tube of dryer lint like substance slid out. It must have weight 1/2 pound!
 
LurkerLito said:
ROFL, I thought someone put wall insulation in the machine.
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Dear god exactly what I was thinking.
But yeah, that's awful.
Probably never been cleaned out in years of use and sat directly on 20 year old carpet.
Nasty stuff carpet, it just holds dirt no matter how often to vacuum or scrub it.
People with asthma aren't supposed to have it in their houses due to that reason.
 
schizrade said:
Tends to be filthy hoarder types in my experience. Used to help this one guy with his PC back in the day and it was always a filth fest. Dirty, filthy, hoarder type people.

God bless the PC techs.
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Heavy smokers will do it. Had one form a smoker that was definitely not a hoarder. But always chain smoked at the computer in a small room. With central air. The audio jacks had tufts of fuzz coming out of them. The tar buildup starts getting sticky an grabs literally everything out of the air. most of the machine was as clogged up as the heatsink in this article.

Combine weed, incense and long haired cats, and it will get pretty bad as well.
 
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