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.
A typical Dell Dimension mini tower sucks up a lot of dust. The pictures here show the amount of crud that commonly builds up behind the front bezel of one of these machines and what the insides look like after a couple of years worth of use.
To the left you see what happens when you don't treat your laptop with care. Sure they are portable, but that doesn't mean that they are indestructable. This one had a fractured LCD, 3 missing keys from the keyboard and a dead hard drive (which was only 2 months old). To the right we have a machine that a customer tried to install a wireless card in to. My guess is that they couldn't figure out which screws left the case come apart, so they just started taking out all the screws they could find. We found two slot covers and a fan rattling around inside the machine when we opened it. Not to mention a lot of dust and no wireless card.
Dusty PCs
These are disgusting. Blech.