computers suck...

This week was no different than any other, and we saw some classic examples of excessive dust build-up inside several machines. The picture at the top left shows the dust that can collect on a P4 heatsink when left unchecked. This can lead to trouble down the road. For starters, a machine like this will generally become louder over time as the fan speeds up to try and cool the CPU, but if left like this for too long, the CPU can sustain physical damage which can cause stability problems or chronic overheating - even after the dust has been cleared away.

I'm sure you have all heard of the dreaded Windows errors that end up at a "blue screen of death". Well, one of our customers last week was experiencing exactly that with their Dell laptop.

Each time Windows would attempt to initialize the video drivers, it would result in a blue screen error stating that the nVidia drivers had crashed. This isn't uncommon, and can usually be fixed simply by starting Windows in VGA mode and reloading the nVidia drivers, but in this case that didn't work.

To investigate further, I lifted the keyboard and found a "liquid" spill that had gone through the keyboard and soaked the video card (which is a removable unit in this particular laptop). The fluid looks like it seeped under the video cards heat spreader and shorted out some of the memory modules. After talking to the customer, we found out that she had suspected her cat, attracted by the warmpth, might have relieved itself on the laptop while it was open and running. This is the first blue screen of death we've seen that was caused by a yellow stream of death.

Once in a while, when I'm not toiling over broke ass computers or cleaning up massive malware infestations, I have a chance to build some nifty computers for our customers. Recently there was this gaming box that was kinda fun to build and certainly a pleasure to burn-in by stretching its legs with some games that were heavy on the eye candy.

This particular machine was commissioned by a young gamer that had the money to spend and wanted a decent box to grow with as his needs changed, but also to kick some serious ass in current games.

The build starts off with the Antec Nine Hundred case. Despite having three 120mm fans and one huge 200mm fan, as long as they are set to low, the machine is very quiet. The benefit of all that air flow though, is cooler internal temperatures and a little more headroom should he decide to push the overclocking envelope a little bit. Cooling aside though, the Antec is a relatively bold looking case, reminiscent of the Apache helicopter design, and that seems to appeal to gamers and non-gamers alike.

It's very hard to do anything to prevent dust build up inside your computer. The current state of the art in PC case design calls for fresh air to be brought in through the front and hot air out to be exhausted out the back. In essence, your computer is basically a small vacuum.

If your computer has room for it, you can help keep some of the dust from getting too far inside the machine by placing a mesh filter behind the faceplate. The idea being to filter out the larger particles without reducing airflow by any tangible amount. If you can't find a suitable mesh filter, improvise and using some mesh from an old screen door, or even a swatch of old pantyhose. When the filter gets clogged up with dust and crud, just remove it, clean it, and reinstall it.

Some things to note:

• The closer your machine is to the floor, the more dust and debris it is likely to pick up. Because the average adult is somewhere between 5 and 6 feet tall, we don't see the dust we kick up as we walk around, which tends to hover about a foot or so off the ground.

• It seems that carpeted areas are worse for dust, not to mention static in during the dry months of the year which is a hazard to PCs for other reasons.

• If you have pets that shed, like cats, dogs etc., expect to clean out your PC more often than people who don't. Their hair and dander gets sucked up and create hair balls inside the front of your machine - much like the computer pictured on the left.

• If you smoke around your computer, good luck with that. I find the sticky yellow residue left behind on computers by smokers is much harder to deal with than any amount of dust or animal hair. It's simply gross. Not to mention is tends to cause fans to seize up and stop working - which leads to overheating and eventually, component failure.

Ok, here's one for Iconboy. I've heard tales of tech's finding dead mice and other related vermin inside industrial computers and/or printers and whatnot, but since I deal mainly with personal computers and small office type customers, I've personally never come across anything that large inside a machine. Here's some pictures of a few critters we've found inside machines in the past though.

I know you're getting tired of seeing pictures of dusty computers, but I can't get enough of this stuff. What kind of environment does a machine have to live in to get so thickly coated with crud? Imagine what the users lungs must look like.

I'm not sure what it is about Dell laptops, but we seem to see an awful lot of them with one or more of the keys popped off. Of course this seems to happen to other makes as well, so perhaps it's just the sheer volume of Dell machines that are out there that make this seem a more Dell centric issue.

The keyboard in this picture however, apparently had something of a sizable weight dropped on it. Whatever it was, it hit the keyboard with such a force that it bent the underlying metal backplate of the keyboard, destroyed a couple of the plastic key hinges and somehow managed to apply enough force to completely disconnect the cable that connects the LCD panel to the system board.

As a computer technician, one of the most common things I do is clean up computers once they have been infected, compromised, hacked or just plain old mistreated. That said, most of the machines we see are fairly routine, and although they can take a good chunk of time to clean up, they generally aren't "difficult".

However, every once in a while a tricky one will come along. For example, we just had a machine in that, on the surface, seemed like a relatively simple trojan infection. I manually removed several obvious files from the \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 folder that were not part of any legit program - Windows or otherwise, removed the corresponding calling references from the system registry and figured I was all but a full virus scan away from putting this one to bed.

When the machine was restarted though, Windows would not fully load. Instead, it stopped at a blue screen error which read as follows:

Stop: c0000135 Unable To Locate Component. "This application has failed to start because baseagul32 was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem.

The machine would not start in safe mode or standard mode and trying the last known good configuration made no difference, so I spent about an hour banging my head against a wall trying to figure out what program baseagul32 belonged to and came up empty.

You know how they say that a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, here are three pictures that speak volumes towards keeping your machine clean.

What with the recent light shows and thunder boomers we've been having, the number of "dead" computers, network cards, cable modems and routers have spiked.

I've been in the computer business almost 20 years now, and in that time, I can only recall a handful of dead network cards - none of which were smote like this one. Usually they end up with an internal short circuit of some type which manifests itself in the form of a brown dot in the middle of the chip. The one pictured to the left obviously had more voltage channeled through it that normal though, as it literally blew a hole in the plastic casing of the IC.