Mr. Lake's New Orleans Forum

I'm not talking about files or software...I'm talking lint and dust.

Last week this 7 year old Dell desktop would not boot up - I just got one of those blue screens with the white message that says who knows what....

As I suspected, I took the side panel off and found a layer of dust on the curcuit boards and everywhere else - A quick cleaning with a small shop vac adn pointy nozzle and the operating system boots right up.

I do this about twice a year for this particular computer.

7 years old? wow.
I equate inner hoovering of the computer with wall washing. I'd rather just put on a new coat of paint.

This got me to thinking that my personal home laptop is getting older and I looked it up. It's 7 years old now, also. I work in IT and except for getting the shop vac on the keyboard every now and then when it particularly grosses me out or I spill something on it, I never clean it.

I clean the surface of my company-provided laptop when it starts to look like a biohazard, or if I have to bring it to a client site and want them to focus on what I'm saying, not the potential science experiments on my keyboard.

I had an Acer laptop which had a cooling fan directed up through the keyboard section. All sorts of stuff would wind up clogging the fan and the damned computer would overheat about every six months or so until I took it apart and cleaned out the gunk. Poor design.

In the age of tablets, ipads, iphones, etc. I'm wondering what has been done to allow for the elimination of fans.

I would guess the elimination of heat producing components.

Got me thinking now. Mine will be 6 years old in April. I know that is getting dinosaurish as far as computers go. Dang. We pay so much for the suckas, you'd think they'd stay more functional for a while longer. Wish I were a computer geek so I could do all kinds of upgrades myself.

Rita, I am geekish but I don't usually bother upgrading anything unless something is physically broken. PCs have reached a point where any of them would run as fast as I would need it to go and would do what I needed it to do, so I just don't see the point in upgrading for the sake of upgrading. What is really fascinating is that I work for a giant IT company, (think blue), and the software applications on my 7 year old home computer are at higher versions than those on my 8 month-old work laptop.

That says a lot...

There a just a few moving parts in a desktop computer and if they don't fail then it comes to simple maintenance I would think.
I have 3 desktops: 2 at the store (each about 6 yrs. old) and the one at home (7 yrs old).
They all work fine and serve us for what we need.
I have re-installed Windows XP on one and keep all of them on automatic Windows updates.
A registry cleaner program helps as well.

Like any appliance, proper maintenance can't hurt.
I just wonder how many good computers are cast aside that have simple maintenance issues...