Clean Your Damn COMPUTER!!!!

OregonLAN said:
Bah, that's nothing. You should see some of the computers that I clean on a monthly basis from the steel foundry...

BTW, if you use an air compressor to blow things out, hold the fans steady or stick something in them to prevent them from spinning uncontrollably. The fan bearing/sleeve can burn up if you spin the blades too fast with high compressed air. Also, they emit a current back to the motherboard.
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Add me to the list of people who watched that and thought "Really?". At home I have a picture of a fairly dirty system; but the worst I can remember was on a horse ranch. To make a long story short, I didn't realize until after I started to blow it out that the mainboard PCB was a bright, blood red color. That's how bad it was. Not a single square inch of that MB was visible to give its color away! Didn't have a respirator, so just held my breath and sprayed away... then blew my face off to boot. :p

Actually, I just remembered a FAR worse computer. Too bad that I'll forget all about it by the time I get home this weekend. :( Thing was just... nasty. Makes me shudder just thinking about it.

And, folks, listen to the advice about fans. Hold them still, one way or another, and blow them out. If you absolutely insist on letting them spin, then at the very least disconnect the fan power connectors to protect the rest of your system! Yes, it's a slight pain in the ass; but it could save you quite a lot of money.

Lesson to take away from all this - a clean computer is a happy computer; a dust clogged computer is a hot computer... and I don't mean that in a good way. :p
 
Ruoh said:
Looks like a pretty typical neglected warehouse computer.
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This exactly. I see much worse all the time at my workplace welding/fab shops... it's where I send all our old PC's for sacrifice.
How they continue working is honestly beyond me... our Cisco gear especially which has been there for many years.
 
The cockroach infested box posted a couple months ago is still the worse I've seen and has opened my eyes to the filth people live with. I now am hesitant to take anyone's computer home when they ask if I can take a look at it. The fist thing I do is opening it outside the house and clean the hell out of it before even considering taking it inside and powering it up.

People can be fucking gross!
 
I work at a shop right now. The worst one i have seen was a computer with a dead rat inside lol.
 
LOL wow that is bad. It's actually worse than some of the computers I saw at the hospital I used to work at. Particular the ones in the casting room. :p
 
120mm Fan:

120mmdust.jpg


Came off in one piece like a wool quilt.
 
I haven't run into the worst of them, but for most machines, a leaf blower has been golden to me. Makes short work of almost everything (except for the tobacco dust-covered heatsinks, of course). I've run into a few cases of "rust dust" as well since there's a lot of machines I work on right off the beach, and at least once I had to sand down a rusty Dell in which its motherboard was shorting out due to rust.
 
duncansil said:
My question is how did the thing stay running long enough to suck up that much crap!?
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One thing I noticed is the CPU heatsink DIDN'T have all that much dust in it. I've opened up my Dad's PC in the past and it had more crap in the heatsink than that PC had, makes me wonder why.

Also, yeah, not terribly surprised on the amount of dust. At my University they put locks on the PCs and after a few years of being on 24/7 with no filters they get pretty disgusting inside, especially considering it's really not a dusty area around here.
 
Had one like that when I started a job in a diesel shop. First thing I did when I got there was take an air gun to it. Black diesel soot came out in a mushroom cloud and one tech had to move to another bay while all the crap settled out of the air. Pretty sure my work pc is pretty close to that level of nasty inside, but alas, I'm not allowed to touch the machine for anything other than work.
 
am i the only one whos noticed that one of these gets posted every few months and the same people make the same comments every single time? i enjoy seeing the computers, but the "oh i saw so much worse here" or "i use positive pressure and filters!" comments are ooooooooold. :)
 
Used to work in the CompUSA tech shop. I had one that was about that covered in dust, except the people also smoked in their house, while using their computers. There was a thick layer of tar on all of the components. After taking it outside and blowing it out though the computer started working again.
 
That is pretty dirty but it's just dust. on the nasty scale it ranks below

2nd place) smoker tar covered computers. we charged an extra $30 to clean those.

1st place) Cat lady computer. We got a call out for an onsite pickup of a computer. When we enter the front door we got hit with a wave of toxic nasty cat stench, there must have been 2 dozen cats in the front room that ran from us. The lady points out where the computer is and the tech with me went to pick it up and it slipped out of his hand because it was covered in a slimy coating of cat spray. He nearly puked and ran to the kitchen to wash his hands but the kitchen sink was full of cat shit, so he ran outside and used the hose while I told the lady that she could call someone else to fix her computer.
 
Soggy said:
1st place) Cat lady computer. We got a call out for an onsite pickup of a computer. When we enter the front door we got hit with a wave of toxic nasty cat stench, there must have been 2 dozen cats in the front room that ran from us. The lady points out where the computer is and the tech with me went to pick it up and it slipped out of his hand because it was covered in a slimy coating of cat spray. He nearly puked and ran to the kitchen to wash his hands but the kitchen sink was full of cat shit, so he ran outside and used the hose while I told the lady that she could call someone else to fix her computer.
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Yikes! :eek:
 
DogChainX said:
At least it wasn't cat hair...you can't just blow that out.
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We had an angora long-haired cat, she shed enough each day to almost make a whole newcat.
On day I started getting classic over heating troubles and when I opened the case the fins on all the heatsinks, and the fans, were packed solid with cat fur felt. Much more frequent cleanings after I saw that...
 
I used to work for a concrete and gravel mining company. Ive seen worse. Far worse.
 
I had to service a computer from a veterinary clinic once. The inside was a solid block of some dust-like material that could almost be pulled out in one peice, and mice had been living in there and building tunnels in it. In various places there were little stashes of dog biscuits that the mice had been collecting. If I'd made a video and put it on YouTube I'd be famous.
 
tuksonrider said:
That's nothing.

In the late 90's, when I worked at CompUSA as a tech, an old guy brought in a computer with a dead PSU. It sat on the shelf for a day or two due to backlog. When we finally got around to looking at it, we picked it up and dropped it on the work bench. About a dozen or so tiny cockroaches came out of the power supply running everywhere.

We all freaked. We immediatly wrapped the entire computer in a large garbage bag and called up the guy to come pick up his computer. We told him it was infested with cockroaches, and we refused to work on it. Hell, we refused to even open up the case. When he picked it up, the bag was full of cockroaches.

A few days later, we had to call an exterminator because our shop was then infested with cockroaches.
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you should have check it, the pc had evil stuff inside to attrack roaches believe me ive seen evil in pc before . ive seen pc of killer and rapist per evil inside.:eek:
 
Dirtybird said:
Seen worse in a custom curtain factory of all places.
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Anything related to textiles is unfathomably dusty. I maintained computers at a 30,000 square foot warehouse for storing cloth rolls and pound goods in. I opened up computers in there that were literally CAKED with lint inside.
 
I'm confident FPS Russia would have a MUCH more effective method than what those guys did.
 
ekuest said:
am i the only one whos noticed that one of these gets posted every few months and the same people make the same comments every single time? i enjoy seeing the computers, but the "oh i saw so much worse here" or "i use positive pressure and filters!" comments are ooooooooold. :)
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They sound middle eastern and the dust looks like what we blew out of our machines avery few months in Iraq, just as bad.

 
ick

my wife's computer ...shut down a few weeks ago, and kept shutting down after being on a few hrs.

i had vacuumed out the case a few months ago(i tend to just put my finger on the fan blades to stop them from moving, but didn't remove the video card and the placement was hard for me to get a good top suction onto the fan/cooling area

her cpu had some dust but was ok and prior to cracking the case the cpu temp was in the normal range, but her video card(amd 5770) was running at about 98c.

this time i removed the video card fully- put my amd 6770 card(almost completely dust free when i removed it) in it so that she could get back to using her computer while i "took care" of the 5770...turning the card so that i could see the fan i immediately recognized the problem...

the cooler grills were caked, i mean CAKED with dust, thus the high temps,
a quick insertion of the crevice tool and a 5 minute vacuum job later the card was dust free. i put it into my computer and it's been working fine since, every week or so i give the gpu temp sensor a check to make sure it's still running in the 50c range.
 
Looks like my mom's computer. Filled to the brim with dust, dog hair, and cigarette tar and smoke. Easier to just buy her a new computer every 2 years than clean that crap.

That dude is a fool to not be wearing a face mask when he's blowing that thing out. That is nasty.
 
Meh, thats not so bad. We were decommissioning a big Xerox production printer a number of years ago and we noticed an 10 base T connector with a cable going through the wall to another room. When we followed the cable we found it was connected to an ancient 386 buried behind someones desk. It was still on... When we connected a monitor to it we found it was running Novell 3.something and appeared to still be working fine. When we shut it off and pried off the cover at first we were shocked because you could see no computer parts, just a brownish grey fuzz that had assumed the flat shape of the computer case. You could literally reach in there and grab a handful of this stuff. It was 100% packed. Like attic insulation only it wasn't super dense, it seemed like dust covered sweater fuzz or something. Haven't seen anything like that before or since...
 
I've seen worse, you should see what a barn can do to the insides of a pc.
 
raises hand you should see my shop computer. Old Amd k6-2 based system, store bought. Its been running 24/7 for the past i dunno 15 years. It has never been cleaned, or opened.

I have already told myself when it finally dies, i am just going to throw it in the dumpster, and buy a new shop computer. I have no interest in even attempting to clean it out.


that being said, i clean my desktop out every 2-3 weeks. Even spray disinfect the keyboard and mouse, while i'm at it.
 
I think a leaf blower would have done a better job for that PC.
 
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