it was aging in the internet ether like a fine wine. What a wonderful
story!
I work in the tech department of a local computer repair shop. A few
weeks ago a very pleasant older woman brought her computer in for
servicing. She said that it was running very slow and crashes all the
time, especially when online with AOL.
It was an old IBM aptive with a pentium 133 and 16 megs of EDO ram.
When I went to open the tower I noticed there were these weird dark
stains on the tower by the grills on either side. When I opened the
case up the most horrible smell arose from the machine. The smell of
cat piss that had been cooking on hot electronics. The inside of her
machine had a dust bunny about five inches long, three or four wide and
about 6 tall in it and everything was covered in this weird mat of
cooked cat hair, dust and cat piss. There were actually dried lumps of
built up dehydrated cat piss in the bottom tray of the tower.
I took it outside and ran an air compressor through the machine, wiped
it down real good with isopropyl and let it dry over night. The next
day I added the ram she wanted and the damn thing booted right up and
ran very well for a win95 box. She called us last night to thank us for
fixing her machine and to let us know that her cats have been banned
from the computer room.....
I've been keeping a close watch on my cats activities near my computer
for the past few weeks now ;-)
Paranoid.
John Rye wrote:
>
> What goes here? I sent this two days ago??
>
> John Rye wrote:
> >
> > Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote:
> > >
> > > Dust is a major problem if you leave the cover off a computer. If you allow a
> > > blanket of dust to form, then heat buildup can definitely be worse than with
> > > the cover on. Fans are cheap nowadays, I think you should get an extra one.
> >
> > A Salutary Tale.
> >
> > Several years ago I was called to Pharmacy to see if I could check
> > their PC out - they thought that a mouse might had died inside.
> >
> > The machine was a very tightly packed NEC 8088 clone. I asked
> > when the machine had last been serviced, and was rather surprised
> > to hear that it hadn't been looked at since it had been installed
> > in 1984 and had been running 24/7 since then!!
> >
> > On opening the case I found a thick layer of matted dust, fibre,
> > paper and various other bits and pieces which had been drawn inside
> > the case, which was fitted into a drawer under a bench.
> >
> > Every component was coated! The floppy drive (5 1/4") was the most
> > amazing I can say I ever saw - so totally filled with dust it could
> > have easily been used to make masters for lost-wax process castings.
> >
> > The smell was from the cooking dirt and dust coating the cpu chip.
> >
> > I lifted the matted much off and restarted the machine and help my
> > breath -
> >
> > It lasted about 5 minutes before giving out a loud 'snort' and failed
> > completely - clouds of smoke, smell of burning plastic, and general
> > panic as that was the budinesses complete record of prescriptions
> > dispensed during the past 10 or so years!
> >
> > As you can image a new machine was installed and a cleaning regime
> > instituted!!
> >
> > Cheers
> >
> > --
> > ICQ# 89345394 Mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > "The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected"
> > (The UNIX Programmer's Manual, 2nd Edition, June 1972.)
>
> --
> ICQ# 89345394 Mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> "The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected"
> (The UNIX Programmer's Manual, 2nd Edition, June 1972.)
--
The frammisgoshes should be distimmed because a frammisgosh is like a
farble
and distimming is like gosketing and our ancestors always gosketed the
farbles.
--R.A. Wilson
