The Dirty PC

I was recently called to a customer’s premises to take a look at their PC which reportedly “crashed a lot”.

Well, when I got their, I was told that the machine hadn’t been switched on for a few months, and upon tapping the power switch I found that the PC did not work at all.

I took the PC away to work on at home, and upon opening the side panel, I found out why this PC wasn’t working.

Here are the photo’s (in no particular order – click for larger image):

Can you spot the obvious problem?  For those of you who can not, this PC is dusty and dirty.

This is not really the fault of the customer, but more to the fault of the environment.  My customer is a hair salon, so it the atmosphere is a great deal of dust, but add to this some hairspray, water, high humidity and so forth it’s easy to see just why this PC became so clogged.

In my opinion the choice of case for this PC was wrong for the environment.  There are no filters of the fan vents, which on their own would have helped a great deal, but even better if they were removable so that the collected dust could have been much more easily removed.

My customer is now looking to buy a computerised till instead of a general PC for their tasks now, as the PC was overkill for their intended use anyway.  Good news for them – bad news for me (they won’t need me anymore!)