Filthy PCs: The X-rated circus of horrors

Well, the "furry creatures" should have been on the same page with the tar

The furry creature ones should have been on the same page with the tar.

Here, you see and they say that smoking is bad. How about finally realising on how bad it is to have a carpet in your house.

Me coat... The one at the end of the laminated flooring hallway...

Right thats it....

... im off to clean my computer, stat!

I love these...

Having seen a good many of them myself.

The CAT-5 monster looks like it might just (if we're very, VERY lucky) evolve into a Flying Spaghetti Monster.

The Great Knot

or a hoamge to his holiness the great FSM?

all hail his noodley appendages etc..

These machines have postapocalyptic soviet soul...

...you can't understand.

hmmmm filth.

I used to work in a coal burning power plant as a system tech.

I should have taken some pictures. Sometimes the coal dust was an inch or two thick. We had to change the lifecycle program just for this location because no matter how much we cleaned the machines, they die premature due to overheating or some other filth related cause.

FSM

Don't be daft, the FSM didn't EVOLVE.

Riverside, CA

I use to live in Riverside, CA, which was officially the dustiest place in the USA. We had filters on all the kit at work and at home and even with a clean every 6-months, kit with fans in got utterly disgustingly coated with fine desert dust.

You could build a sand castle out of what came out of the big filters from the A/C units in the lab!

Love the Filthy PCs Series...

...and hope to see more installments as time goes on! (That "mice in the power supply" picture from the first set has yet to be topped, though.)

In my freelance computer consulting adventures, I came to know a guy who was, shall we say, a "bit" of a smoker. Everything in his apartment had that yellow tinge. It was so bad that there were outlines left around pictures and other things and everything in there had some degree of yellow/brown color to it.

After fixing his computer one day, he told me there was another, broken PC in the closet and asked if I'd take a look at it. Like everything else, it was that filthy yellow color. I took it home in the back of my truck because it stunk so horribly. And then I tore it apart in the driveway, working in a haphazard fashion. As much residue as there was in the thing, I didn't expect it could possibly function. It was certainly filthier than anything I'd ever dealt with before, so much so that I could not even see the components--only their outlines. I really thought I'd just bin it.

It lived, though. I threw the whole darn disassembled thing in the dishwasher and ran it through two whole heavy washing cycles. The water that came out of the machine was a filmy brown color. Even though the pieces still had a very faint aroma of cigarette smoke, they were at least the right color again. I set them in the sun for a few days, put the whole lot back together and it powered right up after installing a new clock battery. Turned out all it really needed was a fresh installation of Windows.

I worry more about what the owners of the apartment will do if/when he moves out.

Feature Creep

Methinks the arachnid antimalware tool is suffering from a bad case of bloat!

OK, I'm going...

Mmmmm sweet aroma

They're pretty bad, but I can beat them......

For reasons too boring to explain sometimes we get PC's returned to the office which need extremely sensitve financial data extracting from them as we're the only department in the company with the necessary knowledge to get past all the security and decrypt the data.

Anyway, we got one of these returned to the office a few years back as it wouldn't boot. No-one thought to warn us that the reason it wouldn't boot was that it had been submerged in flood water heavily contaminated with sewage. The rest I shall leave to your imagination.

The smell was....... smelly.

Did anyone notice...

the majority of the offending PCs appear to be Dells?

Page 8

What more can anyone say?

But the worse thing is ...

... when some ****** decides to use the air duster can on such a machine ... in the office.

Many years ago I was in business with a chap that had run an Apple dealership for some years - back in the Apple II days. One of his customers was the local cellophane factory and he got called to a machine on the shop floor that had stopped working. The hydrogen sulphide in the atmosphere had attacked the metal pins of the chips and some of the pins had eventually corroded through - stopping the machine !

Rotten design

Don't you think there is something rotten and cheap in how computers are built and designed.

The Keyboard is actually the Dirtiest thing you can touch

There have been numerous studies that show that the computer keyboard is one of the filthiest things you can ever touch.

Even when they look clean, they have a layer of microbes multiplying happily on the surface.

In fact, a computer keyboard harbors more dangerous microbes than a toilet seat.

Smutty web surfing on page 10

Has Eddie Abbott PC being surfing the dirty side of the World Wide Web?

All those webs and spiders must have came from him doing something naughty right?

Imagine My job...

I replace peoples compuers all the time, if i took a picture of all the mucky ones I'd be there all day. The worst one I think we ever had wasn't dust related, it was 'drink' related.

Several (at least) cups of some form of brown beverage had been spilled on the desk and not cleaned up properly, we nearly had to get a crowbar to prise the PC from the desk.

Pint icon because after thinking about that PC I think I need one.

given

...that dust is full of all sorts of horrible bacteria in an ordinary home i genuinely fear for the lives of those working on hospital PCs, inhabited by dust creatures.

those smoked out PCs might explain why my laptop failed due to none stop over-heating after spending best part of two years in a permanent thick cloud of pot smoke with me.

Earthing required...

...while cleaning heavily dusted PCs. If I remember correctly, any current buildup should be drained by the earth(ed) pin. On the other hand:

2 gallons of isopropyl alcohol.

1 large basin

1 gas mask. (Alcohol fumes, y'know, or get a really ventilated place to do it)

1 pair of rubber gloves

1 set of soft and hard brushes

Assorted screwdrivers to pry everything of case and back together.

Yeah, these should do. Dip all the components in alcohol and start scrubbing. Gently for the tricky parts, faster for fans and thicker fan grills. A notebook repair shop did that, they showed me how they did it. 48 hours drying, at least

Don't use tire calibration compressors, the compressed air in those is not dry. One of the customers of the said repair shop did that. Not pretty, all the resulting rust.

ew

I've started to take machines outside to air dust them at work, it wasn't worth the massive clouds of dust, which were invariably sucked stright into the nearest working PC :(

I also helped clean out my flatmate's PC. It had spent about two years, near continuously running WoW, whilst he blew fag smoke straight into the intake fan.

The CPU cooler was salvageable after a wash in the sink, unfortunately the crappy fan on the motherboard chipset was almost welded solid with tar. I assume the same must have happened to the GPU fan, we just found it dangling by the wire, with no other attachment to the heatsink, oh, and brown, it was all very brown :(

Where's the plow?

Most of those machines have enough dirt in them for something to take root and grow. That one with the frog in it even had its own fertiliser.

Crowd-sourcing at its finest

Cheers, and all that whiskey

Eeeeeyyaaaargh

That last picture gives me the fear. *shivers*

It's a shame I never think to take photos. I could've contributed such highlights as "the macbook full of white dog hair" and the very "dusty" PC I removed from the crematorium...

Never buy a PC without filtered air intakes, period.

In my PC repair days I saw a brick dust covered PC, from a building site, in addition to plenty of dust bunny PCs, luckily not many smoker tarred PCs.

If your PC does not have air intake filters, I strongly suggest you retrofit proper fan filters or a speaker cover material, or at least fine mesh ASAP, otherwise you will be sorry!

Heatsinks and fans can be a real pig to clean, and if the airflow gets too low it can kill PC components or even cause a fire! I saw one clogged PSU die in smoke, now that was scary, fortunately, the other components were unharmed!

Dirty authors!!!

I recently visited a very good friend of mine to do some PC repairs/ maintenance...

HOW SHOCKED was I to remove a layer of cack from the CPU fan thicker then my Gran's custard!!!

AND, this person writes for this site frequently...

Where can I upload the pictures???

Paris, because her fans have never been this dirty *snigger*

leap frog

was that pc in the last photoa leap frog byany chance?

It's my job to clean computers, and this doesn't shock me!

This is what I actually love about my job. People bring me their computers in, saying they're crashing and freezing, beeping, etc, and all I have to do is spend 1 - 2 hours dismantling everything (completely), cleaning it, renewing thermal grease, (and sometimes the fans if they're burnt out because of the dust) put everything back together, and that's £22 - £44 (£22ph) worth of food on my table, and the customer's machine is spotless. I keep the pile of dust, and cam pics for them, to shock them!

I do this about 7 - 8 times a day, and just the computer cleaning side of my company repair skills earns me a lot on really good weeks, before the actual repairs come in! I've seen spiders, dead hedgehogs, ants, bluebottles, centipedes, woodlice, you name it. It is well worth it, I love my job as a self employed repairer, and despite not liking spiders, wouldn't swap it for the world. I'm a big softie too, and like animals, so seeing dead creatures like hedgehogs (how they got there is another story) inside PC's saddens me, but that's life.

Luckily it's only ever dust, and the occasional insect inside consoles and laptops I do. FAT PS3's get the biggest insects in, having a lot more vents than 360's. Ants seem to think PS3's are fairgrounds, and like having rides on the blades of fans, so much it kills the little blighters, good riddance! It's quite hilarious imagining their little faces as they whizz round and round, their bug eyes popping out!!

That's nothing.

I once installed a server for a group at an office. They wanted to have it near the developers, so we mounted it alone in a 21 inch rack. The server worked for a year, and one day I got a call to "fix it". I went there and found that the floor had been remodeled, they were still fixing and sanding some dry panels in place near the server. I thought it might have been that someone plugged some power tool into the rack's outlet and the power flukes had blown a power supply. So we went to the server (a Compaq Proliant 2000) and opened it's lid. I saw no motherboard. Surprised, my first thought was "someone stole this server's motherboard!". Then I noticed two circular holes in the "bottom". I dragged my finger at the shiny grey surface I thought was the bottom of the server's case. It wasn't. It was a thick (about two inches deep) layer of dust from the driwalls that was sucked in by the server as the walls were being sanded!

The poor server had worked for weeks with its motherboard under a layer of dust several inches thick, but at one point it decided to give up. After a good session with the vacuum cleaner, the server resumed normal work. Very noble server.

The Devil in the Dark

Picture 3 on page 7 is clearly the Horta from the aforementioned Star Trek episode. Just don't clean out the case - it's only protecting its young...