See The Example, Respect The Example: Clean Your Damned Comp

[Shurikane]

I went to my aunt's place yesterday for dinner, and figured as I sat down at her computer that it needed a well-deserved cleaning. I had spoken to her about it last time and so I arrived this time to see a shining bottle of compressed air that hasn't even been used yet.

I had some free time before dinner, so I unplugged everything, put the computer on a table and examined the horror.

Now, my grandma won the style award for managing to have dust balls WITHIN the little door handles used to open her case. In the case of my aunt, it was the quantity award. The LED on the side fan could barely be seen because there was so much dust clogging it.

I break the seal on the canned air, install the nozzle, and give the guts a good shot.

The computer literally explodes with dust.

My aunt starts coughing and says "Get this thing away from me!" Her husband, however, has an idea: put a towel over the computer so that it'll catch the dust. We do that and I use about half of the can cleaning the insides. Hell, the CPU's heat sink alone had turned itself into an air filter of some sort - the damn thing was just foamy. I finish off the job by wiping the outside of the case with a cloth. What used to be a gray computer is now black. The tower is immediately shaken outside and thrown into the laundry, while the wet rag I used to clean had to be rinsed five times throughout the operation.

I plug everything back in, boot up the computer and see a marked increase in speed. Not bad.

Unfortunately, a flurry of shit pops up upon booting. I ask my aunt about that, and she responds "I dunno, it's some kind of virus I think - my kids download all kinds of shit on this computer that I can't even fathom."

I install Ad-Aware, Spybot and MS Spyware Cleaner or whatever it was - the full monty. I scan with Spybot only to get a "nothing found" in less than 5 seconds. Suspicious.

I use the other cleaners, I go through the MSCONFIG and double-check the startup menu and the add/remove programs menu.

The computer had a grand total of 289 harmful files, keys and modules. Including two toll number dialers (thank God she isn't plugged to the phone line), two ad programs, and three malwares designed to prevent the anti-virus and firewall from operating. All of these things had been caught through ActiveX. Bad stuff.

I install Firefox in the hope that it does the trick. I reboot and lo and behold, the computer does a sexy startup without any popups or anything of that sort.

My aunt then asks me about her E-Mail. She can't check it, and an error message pops up and she doesn't know what it means. I open Outlook Express and see, written black on white in her native language (French): "Hotmail no longer allows the use of Outlook Express to retrieve E-Mails." This was no bug as she had thought - she just hadn't bothered to read the damn message.

So, from this story, you people should have learned a few lessons:

-Keep your damned computer dust-free.
-Keep your damned computer up to date.
-Scan your damned computer for spyware.
-If something weird happens, FIGURE OUT WHAT IT IS!
-If you get an error message, READ IT BEFORE PANICKING.

This'll save tech support millions of dollars. Half of which being due to my grandma calling her ISP whenever her computer gets a bug.

[Kothar_Isk]

WOW that reminds my of when my dad dusted out the comp from his body shop. he took it to the back and used and air compressor to blow the dust out(very effective) and the result was a cloud of dust that filled that half of the shop. Two of the body though the paintbooths air filter had exsploded. We brought the comp back into the offise hooked it back up, and even did three car estimates in the hour and half it took all the dust to settle.

[RivaOni]

i dont think this pc has ever had any cleaning done on it besides the case that ive done, however i dont know what im doing so dont want to risk damaging it

[ScrumYummy]

[RivaOni]

Our carpets a bit like that ScrumYummy, except our dogs black and the carpets a deep spanish like orange :S, well it should be, the vacuum cleaners beginning to protest too

[GD]

I could tell some stories...

And I'm still new to the IT field.