Keeping Out the Dust

Contents

The Hall of Shame

We will end this article with pictures of what happens when you don’t keep out the dust. These are some pictures taken by both myself and Michael (Shovenose) of neglected, poorly looked after PCs that have come our way. We apologise in advance if some of them are less than ideal quality. Many of these pictures were taken with smartphones and tablets.

These are some older pictures of an aging Pentium 4 PC which looks as though it has never been cleaned in its life. Remarkably, it hadn’t given the user too many problems until shortly before it came in, and was retired mainly because of its age. I still have the power supply out of that computer – it gets used to this day to drive the fans and ammeters on my load tester.

These were of an older HP computer. The left picture shows it with the CPU cooler assembled, while the right picture shows it with the fan removed. Good luck getting any air through that dust! The power supply from this computer was used for the experiment on the previous page. As you can imagine, it already had a fair bit of dust before I decided to help it along.

These pictures are of custom built PC – also a Pentium 4 era. There was a considerable amount of dust, both on the bottom of the case and in the CPU cooler. While the dust was certainly causing it to run hot, it was the power supply which ultimately finished this computer off. It was an Excel ATX-400, which got a big fat zero and a Fail Award when it was reviewed in the 2012 El-Cheapo Power Supply Roundup. It failed and damaged the motherboard. This computer is a textbook example of both what happens when you don’t keep the dust out, as well as what happens when you cheap out on the power supply.

This was a PC I built for someone several years ago – an early Core 2 Duo. As well as the usual dust buildups in the CPU cooler and on the bottom of the case, a spider appears to have made itself at home in this computer. It appears that this user had a serious case of Computer Bugs, and ended up with a free web site as a result!