A Whole Lotta Dust...

So me and a guy at work were talk'n and we got on the subject of computers and I brought up how I build and work on them just for fun. He told me his stopped work'n a few weeks ago so I said I'd take a look at it to see if I can fix it. Well, lemme just show you the pics and you can probably guess what happened to this e-Machine...

... as soon as I seen this on the side panel, I knew things were gunna be ugly when I opened it up...


lmao, was I ever right; the side came off, and this is what I found.




... pretty sad shape, but it looked even worse when I pulled the fan off the CPU heatsink.


Yeah, there had to be NO air get'n through that at all

So first thing I did was take EVERYTHING apart...


Cleaned it all up, and then through it back together, just for kicks to see if it would boot up.


Well, it wouldn't boot up. Needless to say, I figured he fired his proc because of overheating. Just as a test, I though it in an old socket 478 mobo I had laying around, and it booted up! I couldn't believe it! So next I though, well maybe the PSU got stuffed up with dust and overheated. Took it apart, and found something that defanetly didn't look to healthy...

Yes, that's a burn mark! There was a cap lay'n right against the side of the PSU (way to go e-Machine corp). The cap didn't look physically damaged, but I decided to toss the PSU N E way. Also, something else caught my eye when I had the PSU out...

A wire on the floppy drive plug somehow wore right through the coating, lol!


Well, put in a different PSU, and still wouldn't turn on... Turns out it toasted the mobo. Put that mobo I had ly'n around in it, and she started right up! But, when it did start up, it gave me a "hard drive failure eminate" error or something to that extent. Needless to say, it wouldn't boot into Windows. So the dust caused a mobo, PSU, and hard drive failure!

I guess the moral of the story is

CLEAN UR CASE EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE!

I've seen worse in cases being overall dusty, but that heatsink is a sure winner.

I don't think a shorted-out PSU can be attributed to dust in this instance, though... however, if the case had been opened up sometime in the past, then the floppy drive power cable might have been rerouted to prevent the chafing.

Don't you just hate it when people bring logic into a good cautionary tale and ruin it?

lol. Well, judging by the looks, I think the last time the panel was off the side of this thing was on the assembly line; I mean seriously, it looks like there's a fungus growing on the heatsink...

I think THIS one is one of the worst I've ever seen...

whoa! looks like and old Dell I took out and used as target practice a while ago, lol. It's all saw dust though; can be a little expected with a computer made to work in that environment around a cnc machine... this here was in someone's freak'n house!

Ya, the case is dusty... but not the horrible...

That heatsink is absolutely disgusting though..

i had a friend's celly 350 mhz burn and die from dust - heatsink looked pretty damned close to that one. but seriously, for it to be bad enough to kill a 350 mhz celly... thats just sad.