A friend needed an upgrade from a Windows 95 era machine and another had an old Windows ME Dell with a P III, 512 MB memory, and 20 GB hard drive to get rid of, so it was time to do some machine swapping. The Dell had original papers – it cost near $2k in 2001 – but had lived in a smoking environment and had not suffered any physical maintenance. I was going to post pictures of the humongous dust bunny that inhabited it. Usually there’s a family of dust bunnies in neglected computers but this one had just one big monster.
It turns out Neatorama was ahead of me. Today’s post is about Dirty Computer Pictures.
Some people eat at their computers. Some smoke while computing. And some don’t change the filter on their heating and air system as often as they should. Many of us never open up our computers to see what’s inside, but that’s the first thing your computer repair expert will do. If your PC is anything like these computers, the next thing he/she will do is take a picture. The Register has six pages of these dirty, filthy pictures.
OK. There’s no need to start a “my dust bunny is uglier than yours” contest but there’s no need for that. Just keep in mind that you should remove the cover, especially the front cover which can be a bit harder to remove, every year or so and blow out the dust bunnies. I had to take this one out to the shop and use the blower nozzle for the big air compressor along with some judicious use of soap and water on a few parts. The zip drive and CD RW were removed and set aside rather than try to clean them.
If you smoke, keep in mind that the tars build up on everything and are near impossible to clean. That means anyone trying to use your computer is a non-smoking environment is going to suffer the smell as it lingers, it really does.
The Dell, while a bit odiferous, now runs Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10. A 4 port USB 2.0 board and a Linksys wifi were added to the video and sound cards. The 2 GB drive from the old machine was copied to a folder on the user’s home directory, It will make quite a change as it represents a more than ten year jump in software environments.
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