Developer

I was asked to examine a computer which would not start anymore, the only thing still noticable being the power light on the pc box and "no signal" on the screen. A mainboard related cause was the primary suspect and thus I opened the box to see if anything visible; I couldn't use the acoustic error beeps for reference as there were none.

I had seen similar cases in the past, from burned/exploded electronics to dead memory. This time, a quick glance into the box was all I needed: it was so dusty I could hardly make out any mainboard features other than the CPU cooling block at all. And that was the problem.

The CPU's cooling block was so dusty with all kind of things accumulated and compressed by the fan and then baked by the CPU's heat, that eventually the fan could not start anymore. The mainboard reads the fan's revolutions per minute (rpm) and given they were now 0, the whole system would not start at all.

After cleaning the box as good as I could - among other things with a cold-air hairdryer in a bathtub - the system was back to normal operation. There was enough dust in the box to take it out with my bare hands, think of a hair saloon's floor.

 
The lesson of the day:
Always keep the computer's environment clean and check the box once in a while.

Asok realises that doing - and in particular telling about - too much work backfires.

Dilbert.com

Most of us can identify themselves in at least some of the Dilbert stories, in particular with a technology related work environment. I have added a Dilbert widget to this blog which shows the latest comic strips as well as an archive dating back several years. Best of all, the strips are in color!

It's always a good idea to clean computer peripherals, in particular the mouse. Nowadays, mice come in all sorts of shapes and technologies. No matter what's inside the mouse, it must be clean to function properly.

Dirt prevents mechanical wheels from spinning, optical sensors from reading and lasers and lights from shining. Below an inside shot of a first-generation Logitech TrackMan Marble not cleaned for a decade.

Nowadays, virtually everyone with an email address - no matter how private or public - receives unwanted emails. I am no exception to this, despite email scanners and filters. The trick is to know when an email is spam and scam, when an email is incorrectly labelled by the numerous filters it passes, and when an email has passed all filters untouched despite being a scam.

If you want to contribute to the seemingly neverending war against this flood of annoying emails, you could in the very least ignore such emails and just delete them (never reply to them no matter how much you want to give the sender a piece of your mind) and install some filters to reduce this load. If you come across a Nigerian Scam aka 419 Scam, you could give it a quick read to see if it's the usual prince or solicitor sender or if it comes from a bank employee. In the case of a bank imitation, you could go a step further and actually contact the bank (if it exists).

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