back to article Dirty, dirty PCs: The X-rated picture guide

Our shock picture last Friday of a Quatermass-style lifeform lurking inside a PC prompted a flurry of snaps forwarded by readers who had similarly confronted unspeakable horrors. We gather that many of our correspondents are responding well to therapy, and could be back working in PC maintenance in five years or so. Others, …

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  1. James O'Shea Silver badge

    I don't believe the last two

    Those two are fakes. Gotta be.

  2. Andy Tunnah
    Thumb Up

    that has helped my diet immensely

    looking at those before my dinner break has ensured i won't be having one

    thanks reg!

  3. Anonymous John
    Happy

    Who needs a Dyson?

    When you have a PC quietly hovering up the dust 24/7.

  4. Adrian Jones

    Clearly none of them was running Linux

    Or there would've been a Dust Puppy in there.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Great stuff, keep 'em coming

    and anyone queuing up in the comments with server-room tales of derring-do amid dust bunnies bigger than a Winchester disk, be warned: pics or it didn't happen

  6. SirTainleyBarking
    WTF?

    Errrrr

    I think I'll skip lunch today

  7. Les Matthew

    Anybody got the link

    so I can download the eight legged anti-malware tool? I'm sure it hosed a few bugs in that pc. ;')

    The keyboard on page four is just gross.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Pint

    Nasty

    In my last job, doing Point-of-Sale equipment support, I had to replace a motherboard that died after being peed on by mice... for a long time. It didn't quit the first time around, but only when the acidity of the urine corroded through traces on the board causing the serial ports to drop dead. The PC was full of hundreds of mouse turds and had a smell that was really indescribable. NCR builds some tough equipment, but I don't think they envisioned this.

    So actually there's another good reason besides cooling for keeping those empty card slots filled with blank plates. It keeps out the vermin.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    How Clean is your PC!?

    Kim and Aggie would be shocked, but how clean are the Americans'? Cos their houses are a lot filthier than ours!!!!

  10. D@v3

    @Andy

    Im not so sure.

    I saw something similar to the one from the school once, strangely enough, in a school i worked at. The little scroates made a habit of removing the blanking plates on the front (and back) of the machines, and just pushing stuff in.

    One (hopefully) future Darwin Award winner even saw fit to remove some RAM, from a powered up machine, through the spare 5.1/4 drive.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Those rm machines had flimsy blanking plates.

      One quick push and they just fell out, I think my school replaced the blanks with cut bits of wood in the end.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Re: Who needs a Dyson?

    > When you have a PC quietly hovering up the dust 24/7.

    Quietly? That would be nice.

  12. Paul 8
    Badgers

    Pays not to clean old servers....

    Best not to get rid of the structural dust.

  13. Chimpofdoom!
    Alert

    @ Who needs a Dyson?

    I do, my former PC hoovered my carpet, yet the dyson still fills up in one run!

    My new PC.. hoover failure.. it's an imac...

  14. Keith Oborn

    Half a mouse

    Many years ago I was called to service a machine - the owner had discovered the back half of a mouse sticking out of one of the fans. I was delighted to find that the front half had been comprehensively minced.

  15. Roger Kynaston

    once had a support call

    The user couldn't insert a floppy disk into the drive. Turned out they had never removed any disks and there were about 20 jammed in there!

  16. Knoydart
    Joke

    nasty

    <husky voice>

    dirty dirty pc

    </husky voice>

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    Vacuum cleaning - death to PCs

    Don't know why it is (static?) but I've lost a PC by cleaning it with a VC.

    Although working OK, as a bit of preventative maintenance, I cleaned the fluff from inside. Wouldn't switch back on.

    So what's the option, leave the fluff until it chokes the machine or clean and risk it. Perhaps it needs to be done like a archaeologist with a tiny paint brush.

  18. Disco-Legend-Zeke

    "Worked until we cleaned it."

    Well cleaning a PC is almost as dangerous to it's value as refinishing an antique.

    I have killed two, the first by using windex on the board. D'oh!

    Less obvious: vacuumming. The airflow spun the fan and generated enough EMF to pop something.

  19. mike2R
    Thumb Down

    Heard at work.

    A colleague of mine was working on a customer's laptop. What I heard was "Urgh! I think I've just discovered where this guy scrapes off his earwax..."

  20. Andus McCoatover

    Aint just PC's...

    10 years ago, I was at Nokia's basestation manufacturing facility in Oulu, Finland. Although the breed of machine I was working on was extremely reliable, we did have the odd failure, as can be expected. Usual was lightning killing the transmisson - but that was 'cos the customer had used bell wire for the A-bis (BSC-BTS connection), which isn't good at screening.

    But, back on track - I heard a scream from one of the operators who'd opened a machine for repair from Indonesia. Poor lass had to go for a lie-down. When I saw the problem, I felt like one too (she was pretty, but...)

    They've got these nasty red ants in Indonesia, and thousands of them had climbed the power cable and snuck inside, presumably to keep warm. Unfortunately, for some 220 volt reason that escapes me, they'd died*, and their decomposing and swelling bodies had pushed the PSU - motherboard connector apart.

    Sheesh, happily I've a good constitution, but more sense, therefore I ordered a young work-experience PFY student to clear the fuc*kers out. (BOFH - thanks for the tip!)

    *Not all were dead. S'pose we should've quarantined the surviving hundred or so for 6 months and adopted them as pets for my managers desk, but - think of the paperwork! Nah. Vacuum cleaner did the trick. And a match on the bag.

  21. Bob Gulien
    Happy

    The last...

    are obviously a setup. The mice look too good.

  22. Eddie Edwards
    Unhappy

    Sobering thought

    If it wasn't for my persistent smoker's cough the inside of my lungs would probably look like that!

    Clearly we need to create PCs that can cough. Currently mine only wheezes.

  23. Richard 39

    The keyboard one

    just reminded me I need to pop out and buy a new mouse and keyboard. Thanks el reg

  24. regadpellagru
    Thumb Up

    Last 2 ones ?

    Are they genuine, I wonder ...

    The paper one, probably, I've seen once a tape library jammed with paper, so this one is not too far.

    But the second, I hardly believe the mice would nest here ...

    Anyway, very good pictures !

  25. Chloe Cresswell Silver badge

    Seen some

    Like that before.

    Dust, check, ground coffee an inch thick? check.

    Never had a mouse, although we had a machine in once that was listed as "mouse problem", and we found the mouse in question had used the main board as a loo..

  26. Georgees

    I remember at school....

    'Some' students *cough* used to cram rubbish into the open drive lots of computers until they were full....

    Got to do something between drawing penises in paint and learning how to do a typewriter left swipe in powerpoint.

  27. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Familiar

    These remind me of my time with an at-the-time well known value-added reseller. Once we had to ship a load of Intel PCs (back in the days that they made PCs, built like brick outhouses they were) to the middle east, and they couldn't go in Intel's packaging since it mentioned Israel. So we had to make our own packaging for the batch, which involved sourcing just-the-wrong-size cardboard boxes and having to mould own own foam inserts. The best way to accurately mould a foam insert? To put a PC in the box and flood in the evil liquid gunk round it. Utterly trashed, obviously, and no idea why they didn't strip out the PC's innards first. I don't think we sold that one on after a scrub up, but the fact it went through QA/returns some time later certainly suggested it had a chance, and we certainly sold on worse under the guise of "new"...

  28. SmallYellowFuzzyDuck, how pweety!

    A new type of case modding?

    "No, that's not dirt, it's a case mod!"

    Maybe we could start a new trend here.

    I used to fix computers for schools and yes like the one picture first job would be to open the case and pull all the sweet wrappers out.

    I remember a very nasty one where an infant school had sent us a printer. One of the little horrors had dumped a large amount of sand into it.

    I think it took me something like two days separating out every last component and cog and cleaning them by hand.

    Send more pictures everyone FTW!

  29. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    this

    This is my extreme pornography!

  30. Helldesk Dogsbody

    @James O'Shea

    I'm unconvinced by the last picture but the school one I can believe. I'd imagine that the actual case was no oil painting either!

  31. Winkypop Silver badge
    Badgers

    PC clean this weekend

    Yesireeee!

  32. Andus McCoatover
    FAIL

    @ Familiar - sodding hell.

    "The best way to accurately mould a foam insert? To put a PC in the box and flood in the evil liquid gunk round it."

    Er, wrap the fuc*king PC etc. in a polythene bag first?

    FFS, ain't exactly hard. Did the same trick about 25 years ago - no complaints or returns.

    (Yep, I had to get a new passport because of the Ben Gurian arrival stamp in it.)

  33. Jason Togneri
    Boffin

    @ Keith Oborn and @ vacuuming

    Keith: what the heck sort of fans were you using? I've stuck my fingers into numerous sizes and speeds of fans over the years and while they're pretty painful, the most violent of them could probably only snap a mouse's neck, at worst. Anything that could mince up a rodent could probably do likewise to fingers and therefore wouldn't be allowed in a computer in the first place, so I don't believe you.

    As for vacuuming, there are two ways to damage a computer. The predominant method is with static, as most vacuum nozzles are plastic, and generate static very easily. The other is, as also mentioned, by trying to clean spinning fans, but you're more likely just to damage the fan than to cause any greater damage.

  34. Newt_Othis
    Dead Vulture

    Grey dust

    Reminds me of the time, years ago, when repairing a PC from the local crematorium.

    The entire inside of the box was a uniform light grey. Thought it best to take it outside before using the air-duster.

    -----

    Just reminded myself of the last PC I air-dusted. Would have loved to see the expression of the spider that was evicted at an arachnid equivalent of warp speed!

  35. Secretgeek
    WTF?

    The horror!

    Where are people keeping their pc's? Some of them look like they've just been lifted out of a swamp!

    Truly truly hideous.

    I both hate you El Reg for inflicting those images onto my poor distressed retina and admire your courage for having to wade through them in the first place.

    Blergh.

  36. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Warm and comfy

    Once found a mouse's nest along with it's stash of m&ms in an ibm pc.

  37. William Towle
    Welcome

    @D@v3

    D@v3> "

    I saw something similar to the one from the school once, strangely enough, in a school i worked at. The little scroates made a habit of removing the blanking plates on the front (and back) of the machines, and just pushing stuff in.

    "

    Methinks that's at least two folks who were lucky the perps did it to get stuff *in*!

  38. Peter Gathercole Silver badge
    Linux

    @Adrian Jones

    Just hope that Lord Crud and Hastur are not hiding anywhere!

  39. Simon 79
    FAIL

    Oh the memories!!

    I used to manage an independant PC Repair/Sales shop and we had a "Wall of Fame" for things like this. I wish I had taken digital copies of the photos now. The worst one I had would rival and probably beat all of these. A bloke brought his PC in, he was raspy and had trouble breathing, I found out to smoking problems. When I opened up the pc the smell was pure horrible, old tobacco and dog. Apparently his couple of dogs liked lying next to the PC whilst cos it was warm.... honestly inch thick hair congealed and fused with sticky tobacco smoke... I almost threw up - should have done it in the case, made it look prettier.

  40. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    cheapskate manufacturers don't help

    Spiders. Bane of my life. For some reason, they like my PC's and I don't like regularly degunking them. Least I know when the fan stutters, it's caught another big one. Worst is a Dell (for many reasons) one being the large mesh grill on the front with no air filter, but fitting one of those would add at least 50p to the cost.

    Worst thing I've seen is going to check why PSU's kept failing on a big router in the main data center of a country that shall remain nameless's telecomms ministry. The thick layer of pigeon poop on the outside really didn't help airflow.

  41. David Adams
    Flame

    Mice

    We've had the same problem with mice in printers, on customer sites.

    Their main problem is that as they are permanently incontinent, they pee on the power supply and electrocute themselves!!

  42. Andrew Culpeck

    Anti Smoking posters...

    ...could do with showing the inside of a smokesrs PC with a strap line of something like this is what it has done to the PC and it don't even smoke

  43. Stoneshop
    Boffin

    @Jason Togneri

    Let me introduce you to the fans fitted in the venerable VAX 11/780.

    They're dual squirrelcage units (although it would be a very unwise squirrel who would use them as their cage), 20cm diameter, 40cm long, driven by a three-phase motor, half a kW or so.

    They were deeply recessed in the bottom rear of the machine, but given the grid openings in the fan guards a curious mouse could well have gotten inside and into the fans. In which case the wall behind it would have been sprayed with minced mouse.

  44. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Disdusting

    Absolutely disdusting.

  45. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @Newt_Othis

    <pedant> speed doesn't scale </pedant>

  46. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Grenade

    Tried to get sand and dust out of a PC...

    ...by dumping a few liters of demineralised water onto (and not sparing the power supply either). How did the sand get in? The building's front had been sanded down during a the preceding week and the stuff had seeped in through cracks in the window frames.

    The PC still worked afterwards.

  47. Peter Simpson 1
    Flame

    Mouse killer

    @ James O'Shea: The mice are probably real (though I wouldn't like to see it after a few eeks).

    Those heatsinks are usually at line voltage and best not to touch them!

    // mmmm! Toasted meeses!

  48. Ian 49
    FAIL

    Best one I've ever met

    was back in the early 90s when the company I was working for had supplied PCs to a local foundry (yes, we still had one back then - a whole real factory too!) for admin purposes. We'd built them a network in the offices, plugged all the machines in and agreed to attend when one failed a few weeks later.

    They'd picked it up and moved it out (with a BNC network extension) into the foundry area itself. In less than two weeks the entire PC was choked with residue to the point at which you could no longer see the motherboard components and the RAM sticks looked like those wooden constructions they use to stop sand eroding away from coastlines. The PC was totally dead, wouldn't even spin up the power supply after being cleaned out (and this was an AT supply, well before soft switching).

    We sold them a new PC. They agreed to keep it in the office area.

  49. BlueGreen

    cautiously into the vomitorium

    I worked with a guy (who as it happens wrote a reg article, so double the no-names pack drill) whose keyboard totally put to shame the pics here. The thick encrustations of food meant no-one but him would touch it. The plan, you see it now. Thick, greasy, moulded into fingertip-indents on some of the upper row.... <bleauurgh>.

    Thick grey dust is impressive but it's the organic crap that really hits the revulsion button.

  50. Miguel Farah
    WTF?

    Hmmm... that's brownish dirt. I'm used to dark grey.

    Most of the dust in the pictures are brownish in color. Where I live (Santiago, Chile), the dust is grey (much like the one in the first picture in page 4, altough a bit darker).

    I once had to service an OLD 286 server that had been left running for at least 6 years undisturbed. That little computer proved its incredible toughness when I cleaned it: the main vent had ben clogged by what could be only described as a "dust curtain", 2mm thick. I actually took it off by the tips and moved it *in one piece* without it breaking.

  51. Stu
    Badgers

    @Eddie Edwards - coughing PCs

    In all seriousnesses, thats not all that bad an idea - you know the PlayStation 3 has a mode whereby it'll blast the system fan at full whack for a few seconds when you press a combination of buttons at switch-on. Theres a ridiculously big fan mounted across about three large processor chips and it sounds like hell when you do it.

    My Lenovo ThinkStation D10 workstation machine does something similar every time it boots - sounds like a jet engine, not really cough-like, but a close enough approximation.

    Perhaps all PCs should come with something similar - good for dust buildup I'd presume, not so good for mice, spiders, tropical poisonous ants. etc. Might make em last a bit longer.

  52. DI_Wyman
    Happy

    Fluffy!

    I may be wrong but aren't a lot of those Dell, so does that mean Dell really suck?

  53. WingCo
    Happy

    Those were the days...

    ...When I used to work on old Wang kit, crawling around secretaries legs cleaning out the Wang office kit with a brush and hoover. Actually managed to bed two of them (secretaries that is...)

  54. Alasdair S
    Joke

    what?

    Over 50 comments so far and not one "I wish my wife/girlfriend was as dirty as these PCs"!

    Do Reg readers not have girlfriends or don't they have a puerile sense of humour?

    And there was me ready with the obligatory reply "she is mate!"

    Standards are slipping. Or rising.

  55. Sceptical Bastard

    @ Alasdair S

    "Do Reg readers not have girlfriends..."

    Of course we do! Who do you think keeps our machines dust-free as part of their housework?

  56. Robert Pena
    Alert

    Dirty

    When I was going to college, the digital imaging department replace their bondi blue imacs with g4 powermacs and we had the pleasure of cleaning out the old ones. They were completely filled with dust. A solid mass of dust. I was wondering how they were still working.

    Also, a friend wanted his computer fix and upon opening it up, I noticed a cockroach or two inside the case. I don't know why I decided to check the power supply, but it was infested with them. I had to use a hair dryer outside to get rid of them all.

  57. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @ WingCo

    So did you "Wang kit" or did she?

  58. Gumby 1
    Black Helicopters

    And another one

    Missed this request before, otherwise I would have added this beauty. http://www.flickr.com/photos/gumby_roffo/2767022580/in/set-72157604046476938/

  59. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Computer Infestation

    Once went to a server based at a museum to upgrade the hard drives. On opening found several inches deep of dead insects in it. The helpful biology guy at the museum identified them a clothes moths. Appears several weeks earlier the museum staff had found that the dressing up clothes for kiddies had been infested with human fleas... they had washed said clothes then had hung them up to dry on the mezzanine floor above the server location - then promptly forgot about them for several weeks. The clothes had then become infected with clothes moths... so they eventually threw the clothes out but they continued to have a on-going problem with moths.... appears they had set up nest or breeding colony somewhere warm - in said server....

  60. Bernie 2

    Who are these amateurs who have broken PCs by cleaning them?

    I regularly SHOWER heatsinks, fan still attached, then put them back in the PC after minimal drying. (outside completely dry, but some small water droplets still trapped between the blades)

    It really is the fastest and most comprehensive way to get the dust out. Might not be so good for the fan's bearings but I'll be damned if I can give a crap.

    Oh and BTW, if you break your PC, I never told you it was a good idea. Okay?

  61. Mark S 1

    Solution?

    Fanless.

  62. Martin Kirk

    Not a bug, but a frog

    I wish I had taken a picture, but regrettably I didn't. The strangest thing I found in one of my servers was a dead frog. My cat tended to bring frogs into the house, and I would find their dried out bodies under the sofa months later.

    Then one day, I was adding a new video card to the server, and inside I found a dessicated frog corpse. As to how it got in, I can only imagine it jumped in through the one missing card slot cover. The alternative is that the cat posted it inside, which is too weird to contemplate.

  63. Anonymous Coward
    Pint

    A year in Afghanistan...

    I was sent by my National Guard unit to the Middle east some months back, my job was computer systems maintenance. You can't imagine how much dust and sand can get into a server rack sitting inside of a tent during a sandstorm (The building the data center was supposed to be in was mortared the day before so everything was moved outside into tents until the CB's could fix the building).

    I dumped enough sand from one rack out to fill 1 .5 oil drums, ruining about 40 HDDs, 20-something power supplies and dozens of other parts, I now believe that accidental damage warranties are worth the money, at least in a war zone...

    Too bad the closest alcohol was 100s of miles away, i really could have gone for something stong then...

  64. ZenCoder

    I have a pic somewhere ...

    My friend found a small half decomposed dead bird in the wiring "nest" behind his PC. He lives alone and has no pets so it wasn't something a cat dragged in.

    His best guess was when they did some cabinet work 3 years earlier they let the bird in which then injured itself flying into a wall, crawled into the nest of wires and died.

    He send me the pic. As for his cleaning habits ... the vacuum cleaner he bought four years earlier was still spotless :)

  65. Allan George Dyer
    Coffee/keyboard

    Design mystery

    Since the earliest days of PCs, I've wondered why the most enduring design feature is locating the most dust-sensitive component (formerly floppy drive, now DVD drive) precisely where the fan is going to suck dust into it.

    The dust I get in computers here is black.

  66. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    My favorite power supply failures are...

    ...these:

    http://www.insectimage.com/Gallery%2017/snakecomp2.html

    and

    http://www.insectimage.com/Gallery%2017/snakecomp3.html

    Many years ago, when the IBM PC/XT was an infant, I had occasion to service a MultiBus-based tower system. These had a card cage in the lower part of a tower, holding PCBs about the size of a sheet of paper, with two 5.25" (~133mm) full-height hard drives (think two DVD drives stacked) in the top.

    This system had at least 2" (50mm) of lint in the bottom of the case on either side of the card cage, each of the PCBs had a layer top and bottom, and the hard drives were coated above and below the PCBs on them. Suprisingly, the drives had failed... And this thing had been at a law office, which is usually a well-kept environment.

    After that, I got to take care of systems from the manufacturing line. Worse. Especially when maintenance crossed up the power, but then the issue was smoke coming out of a server rack, not simply dust.

    netgeek

  67. Paul 129
    Coffee/keyboard

    Fwomp!

    Was the sound of the worst PC I have ever seen. It was still working, located in a vehicle workshop, and it only had dust in it, probably from umpteen brake services etc.

    The dust in the bottom was about 10mm thick, seriously. When I turned it flat to open up the box and look inside it made a loud fwomp sound... That was about 15 years ago now, and I have only serviced computers for a living. Sure you get your weed filled,... err tobacco filled yellow machines that stink out the workshop for days after you've got rid of them, but they're really nothing like the workshop machine...

  68. A. Lewis

    Good stuff

    Shame I didn't take a photo of the PC I brought back from the crematorium that is in the area I support. That was really dusty in a very grim way.

  69. Alan W. Rateliff, II
    Paris Hilton

    Exposing my dear father (not like that, pervs)

    Breaking my vow of Interweb silence about mentioning those who are not me, I am compelled to wonder how many others can relate.

    Of course, I am IT support for my family. My father, in particular. He is a curious soul, Bless him, but has plenty of distractions. He called me up one day to tell me that he believed his hard drive had crashed. Never, EVER, believing the assumptions of the end user -- which probably makes me Dell-like -- I ask him what drew him to that conclusion. It just would not boot, and he got a blank screen.

    Fine. I had him send it to me. As an aside, UPS mangled the damned thing, and it was packed pretty well.

    Opening the case (what remained of it, see previous sentence) I did not see anything really obvious at first glance, but a few seconds in I noticed the CPU fan on his AMD Athlon XP 1600+ was caked with so much dust and cat hair that it looked like a layer of paper-mâché between the fan and the heat sink. Obviously this was a problem. I figured it had suffered a massive thermal break-down and I would replace the CPU to see if that revived the system.

    That was until I noticed that several surface-mounted components on the motherboard had slid out of position as the solder had heated up enough to allow gravity to work its magic on various inductors and voltage regulators. Then I noticed that the socket had also moved ever so slightly.

    The CPU had nice brown crispy spots, and I decided to take photos for posterity. It is a good laugh now, and its replacement was the last computer I ever had to build for me dear-ol' pop.

    Paris, nice brown crispy spots. Photos ONLY for posterity.

  70. Paul Taylor 1

    Not just PC's

    The company i work for is a Vendor within the Theme Park industry. As such i have PC's and servers all over the world, within Theme Parks.

    As a vendor we have to put our servers within the "Shops" that we operate, not an ideal environment. Hence i use good ol Tough as Bricks HP Proliants. Typcially ML370 G3's, and now G5's.

    Anyway, yearly we run a cleaning programme where by an engineer visits each Theme Park and strips each machine, armed with cans of compressed air.

    Last year i visited a theme park in New England USA. To clean our equipment.

    I opened the server cabinet to clean our server and the front of the ML370 was not even visible.

    There was a 1in carpet of "Stuff" attached to the whole front of the server, completely covering every sq mm.

    It was Gross. Any yet the server was still running happily with no temp related issues.

    It took 3 cans to clean that bad boy !.

    Wish i had some pics, but unfortunately i do not.

    As with another poster above, we also have Rat urine issues. They pee over everything, and poop on everything. We now wrap the keyboard within our Server cabinets in a clear plastic bag. So it can be removed when the engineer visits. Nothing worse than typing on a keyboard covered in Rats pee. Trust me....

    And for some reason, they love to chew Fibre optics too. I normally have to re-terminate at least 20 fibre strands a yr.

  71. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    One find to RULE them all...

    I always remember when I had to go check on a PC which had a Slimline CD drive that wouldn't open. Turned out there was the best part of a 30cm ruler inside. Got to love schoolchildren...

  72. Colin Wilson
    Coffee/keyboard

    That keyboard reminds me...

    ...why I got myself an IBM Model M keyboard...

    To clean this behemoth up, you simply pop the keycaps off and give 'em a good rinsing off :-)

    Which reminds me, I need to arrange a birthday party for it - it was "born" on the 19th November 1989 and still works as nicely as the day it thudded (it weighs more that most laptops) off the production line.

    Anyone else got 20 year old computer hardware that's genuinely still in daily use ?

  73. Tim Bates
    FAIL

    These are nothing!

    None of those go close to the things we get on a monthly basis in our shop. The spider webs shown here are a tiny display compared to what we have seen.

    If you want really disturbing (and I think I've got a photo somewhere) then look no further than a gecko killed by 240V. The eyes explode out of the sockets.

  74. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Ah, factory machines...

    Placement year from uni, at a factory that made vitamin pills.

    There was this one, aging, powered on 24x7, PC in the factory area - and I needed to do something with it. I forget what. Anyway, lid off - and it was SOLID with vitamin powder... That was a two-can-air-duster job...

  75. Miguel Farah
    Thumb Up

    Model M keyboards RULE!

    @Colin: "Anyone else got 20 year old computer hardware that's genuinely still in daily use ?"

    Yes, indeed. I have several Model M keyboards - one on my home PC, another one in my work PC, and five more stored away in case either ever fails or doesn't outlast me (ha ha ha).

    I've been asked to give away a couple of those, but I've refused.

  76. Dave_H
    Unhappy

    Shop soiled

    I used to look after the terminals used to record record sales in the UK - when this was still done independently by Gallup.

    If a shop reported a problem we sent them a replacement by courier, and asked them to place the 'faulty' one back in the box, for the courier who would wait for it.

    I should have been a little curious when one customer broke off from drumming with the barcode wand long enough to ask if he should place the computer in a bag first.

    When it got to us it didn't take long to work out that the shop had been flooded when a sewer broke. Although the computer still worked, there was no way we were going to clean that up and send it out again. Urgh!

  77. Mark Gowdy

    Spider vs 240V

    This wee guy crawled onto the power board. What followed didn't smell very nice.

    http://mobypicture.com/?4ltelh

  78. Amos
    Alert

    Dust bunnies are not all bad....

    I upgraded from hand-vacuum to a full hoover in 2004 after opening an old third-hand IBM box that had been through two house fires and five years of garage duty. The machine (barely) worked before the cleanup and not afterwards. I think the desert spoon required to dig ash out around the RAM boards did some damage. In retrospect I think the prior buildup of dustbunnies died as unsung heroes in the fires, protecting the PC from meltdown.

    @reg: no I don't quite believe the last two.

    * Fitting packets through small gaps is a student pasttime, but fitting a dell mouse in there as well is a bit beyond them.

    * Have seen real mice-kebabs coming out of power supplies and those two were suspiciously missing a whole lot of exterior charcoal.

  79. Lars Silver badge
    Happy

    Just look at the bright side

    Apparently electronics are fairly "dust proof".

    And to my experience the only proper way is to blow it a way.

    Cleaning the rests of womiting is harder. And I leave it at that.

  80. This post has been deleted by its author

  81. Roger Heathcote 1

    @amos

    Actually it's quite plausible. It's a Dell machine GX1 ~ GX110 and the cover comes off the chassis with the press of two little plastic buttons (gotta love Dell cases!). There's a CD drive there so it's not like they had a blanking plate to prise out and shove stuff through. The only way they could have gotten anything in there is to take the whole lid off so there's no reason they couldn't have dropped a mouse in before popping it back on, would take <10 seconds.

    Roger

  82. Steve Coffman

    School computers

    I work for a school district and we find all sorts of interesting things crammed into computer cases, DVD/CD ROM drives etc.; wrappers, candy, paperclips, pens etc. One time a student hid a container of milk behind a system and no one knew it was there until it burst and rotten milk poured out onto it... luckily it didn't fry anything but it sure didn't smell too good. I think the best one was computer at our alternative High School that some kid was using for his drug stash... his plastic baggie came into contact with the CPU fan and started making a lot of noise...

    We also have a control computer fairly close to a CNC mill and it gets pretty full of sawdust that has to be periodically cleaned out. Used to have an old PIII that was running it for 4-5 years that had never been cleaned out and I'm surprised it was still running when we finally upgraded it...

  83. Richard Neill

    Buy a good case and go for a silent PC

    The upside to buying "silent" PCs (or at least very quiet ones), with good cases and air-filters is that they fill up with far less dust. I believe that a PC should be quiet to the point that you can hear birdsong through a closed window when the PC is running...and that makes a huge difference to how pleasant they are to use, as well as to re-build.

  84. Brian 53
    IT Angle

    Makes me wish...

    I'd taken a photo of the 400 year old kit with the MFM double-height 5 MB drive in the test equipment; no one else in the IT group even remembered what that was, let alone how to do anything with it. Sadly, it was dead before it hit the ground (several times). One of the guys wondered why the drive needed two ribbon cables... Somebody else wanted to know how expensive a big drive like that would be...

  85. JC 2
    Alert

    Static

    All too often someone pretends to know about PC cleaning damage. Plastic nozzels don't matter, nor does spinning a fan. The damage is done by movement of dust particles, that creates static whether it be sucking, blowing, brushing, etc.

    While it is seldom done, the safest cleaning method is (believe it or not, some have voodoo superstitions about such things) immersion cleaning. That's liquid kids, even in a mild detergent solution you are posing less risk to the boards providing you take out the battery and fans, but for those who feel the boards are allergic to water, how do you think they clean them of flux residue after manufacture?!

    I can understand though, a technician not wanting to bother doing it the right way. It's so much quicker to just grab a can of compressed air and after all it's not your kit is it?

  86. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Suicide attacks

    We have had to make pillow cased sized bags out of a fly mesh type material for the Guest Internet PC's at our caravan park. It is up in far North Queensland in Australia and so far I've had 3 PC's power supplies fried by 2 Gekkos and a Wolf spider. Only the spider was kind enough not to fry the rest of the PC in it's suicide attack. That doesn't compare to the cockroach colony brought back by a customer complaining their Panasonic cordless phone base stopped working. There were too many to count, must have had something to do with being warm all the time and being in the kitchen.

  87. John 61
    Flame

    A cautionary tale... (a true sotry)

    Acouple of years back, the guy over the road was beavering away on his PC, and quite a bit of dust had built up inside it. Being a switched on all the time school of computing he left it alone. Shortly after, it burst into flames, almost setting the house on fire. The fire brigade were there for about 3 hours, they managed to put the fire out, but the entire house was smoke damged. It took almost a year and 4 large skips to sort it out, the electrics were fried and all his furniture was condemed by the local council along with the rest of the house. It took ages to get it sorted out and liveavble again. He was in the middle of doing the house up to sell it, but this put the kybosh on that. Now he just wanders round looking miserable all the time.

    My box is in a dusty area where spiders, earwigs, various other flying insects, and the odd wasp reside, but they are kind enough not to have taken up residence inside. I make a point of opening it up every 6 months or so, and using a small paint brush and battery vacuum cleaner (yes they do work) to clean it out whether it needs it or not.

    Fire, 'cos that's exactly what happened.

  88. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Yet More ME TOO Stories

    The worst I ever ran into was a computer that some guy kept in his wood shop...right next door to some big saw. The machine was about 1/2 full of sawdust and featured a family of mice, huddled around the CPU, all dead. They hadn't been dead long enough to dry out and were just not very pleasant.

    Then there was the smelly laptop. It wouldn't boot and had a strange, familiar and nasty odour to it. We opened it up to find a lot of corrosion and a hideous, hideous smell. It turned out that some cat had decided that laptops were where all the cool cats pee.

    I've also encountered a keyboard that seemed a bit dirty. I turned it over and banged down revealing a massive pile of public hair. It looked as if someone with a sizable bush shaved and then shoved all the shavings between the keys. It was naaaaaaasty.

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