Your Battle Station or should your machine be in a museum
A3DLover
Posts: 198
This is my machine ive been running daz software on for the last 19 or 20 years.
A 2003 pentium 4 2.56 gb cpu with a 512mb nvidia gcard and 2.25 gb ram in a generic cabinet with a is7 abit mb. most of the daz software runs flawlessly on it except bryce 7 pro and daz studio pro 4.xx
Whats your battle station look like and how bad have let it get before breaking out the 225psi air hose to clean it?
mods feel free to move merge or add post to appropiate thread.
first pic is how bad i let it get dirty, second pic is recently cleaned
dirty pc.jpg
4160 x 2340 - 2M
cleaned pc.jpg
4160 x 2340 - 2M
Post edited by A3DLover on
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Comments
looking at that first picture I am surprised it hasn't caught fire
I am surprised it even runs, holy cow!.
Impressive!
My phone crushes that thing.
Yowza...
Okay, I don't feel so bad about my 2015 XPS 8700...
I vacuum frequently, so it never gets that dusty.
At one point I worked for a lab doing dirty IT work (like physically installing stuff, running cable, fixing broken stuff)... As bad as your computer is I've actually seen worse... well, slightly worse... and I'm assuming there are no roaches living in it... there was this one outbuilding at the lab that was inhabited by Slobonians (From the planet Slobo) they had zero personal hygiene hang ups and were one with the flora and fauna living in and around their desks... seriously gross stuff, (not as bad as the carpet of roaches in an apartment I helped clean out, but around four spaces below that)... yeah... the computers that weren't inhabited, were super dusty, and seeing that made me very aware of dust.
I tip my hat to you dear sir, both for keeping that computer running, for surviving whatever apocalyptic lint storm came through and for managing to clean it up afterwards.
Yeah. When I was in our Workstation Team at the railroad, we got a few machines back from the loco shops to refurb/recycle - dust , fur, roaches, deand alive, and a few dead mice and a ton of mouse leavings.. (which explained the shorted power supplies..)
LAter on, we had a network node server at Union Station die.. My Mate Craig and I went over to see what could be done. , and there was NO SERVER IN SIGHT.. we ended up putting tone on and following the network cabling until it disappere behid a wall Some doofus renovation guys had actually walled it up..
..hmm walled up the server Sounds like a plot from one of those old Hammer films.
That's what happens when you live next to a lint factory!
Did you use toothpaste to clean it up, and did that fix all the cavities?
A touch of acetone or butanol could work?
My computers never got that dusty, but in my short, late-life career of reviving damaged and suffocating computers belonging to less fastidius people I saw many in a nearly equal state of gasping. But the most interesting of those was during a house call where the customer's machine was buried under the her junk laden table, covered in a quarter inch of dust, cat & dog hair, and a couple dozen dead ladybugs and all glued together with damp, sticky, cigarette smoke. That was before I opened it.
After I pulled it out from under the table and once it was open, it looked similar to your image above with a nice carpet of damp gooey, nicotininated dust, spiderwebs, spiders and ladybugs. I discovered this while still sitting on the floor (filthy carpet) with the computer tower laying on its side, facing up. I turned the system on, just see what would light up, turn on, or grunt, but I couldn't see where the CPU fan was, so I poked around and found it. I gave it a little shove and it immediately started spinning (fast) and lifted straight up out of the case, flew high in the room and skittered across the ceiling, flinging dust from the blades as it flew.
My conjecture is that the dust had overheated the system, then the fan bearings had seized and the fan hadn't been turning, leading to more overheating, and possibly the heat from the CPU degraded the plastic of the fan shaft. Then I come along, give the fan a little push, breaking what's left of the plastic fan shaft, the fan is now free to spin, and flew up past my face spraying dust in its exhuberence of being finally free.
But the silver lining is that I had a pretty good idea what was wrong with the computer.
Since no one else is posting pictures, I'm going to sit here and not post anything.
My dad, a life-long smoker, along with his 3rd wife, found his 80s Macintosh had its floppy drives stickied up from nicotine and crap. So he cleaned it out, bought a 'smoke eater', rebuilt the data that had been destroyed and thought he was good. Lost another floppy to nicotine stickiness. Declared his condo a smoke free zone and eventually quit smoking. Said 3rd wife not a happy camper.
At the same time, I was managing a Remote Processing Center for a Base Supply in the USAF, and with our Sperry engineer, we took a walk around the facility to see why the keyboards were failing so often. Ashes, coffee spills, Coke spills, metal gum wappers, lunch debris, paperclips, were just some of the weapons of choice. Signs posted to the effect that 'Thou shall not feed the computer!' had not seem to work. So when some bright bulb decided to use an old teletype remote machine as a coffee table and it tipped her coffee cup into the machine, she was billed for the cost of the machine. Just a note, airmen don't get paid enough to pay that back in one paycheck, or six. Even if it was old technology, it had still worked and was needed. It drove the point home.
I someday think my flatmate's older computers only work due to the dirt holding it together. But I do bring out my keyboard/mouse cleaning kit when I can't stand it anymore.
Oh, I have pictures. Lots of them. Dusty computers were not uncommon in my experience. I took and kept pictures with which to amuse my friends, but now they (the pictures, not the friends) are all stored safely away in one of my impossibly huge photo archives or another, unindexed, and without meaningful titles (just image numbers). I don't think I'll live long enough to look through all those pictures again.
(Too many Kodak Moments.)
Although I am still impressed when I see a winner like the subject of this thread. And it's working too!
I've chased a family of mice from research PCs that had been sitting in a military equipment shed in the middle of a Virginia pasture for 6 months unattended.
My Old Phone crushes that thing...
That's a commendable effort OP! I've seen worse but not by much.
I was IT support in local schools during the dark ages. It was a, 'This is the server and this is a copy of netware for dummies kind of deal.' I think the high point was a 3 1/2" floppy drive with a cream cracker mushed into it.
Went on to an international that did PC based industrial, mil and retail stuff. I've taken receipt of a roach infested system and a psu with an electrocuted mouse from the field service guys. I sent the second guy a refurb psu and returned his dead mouse with a beyond ecconomic repair sticker attached.
Oh Lordy.. Netware... when it worked , it worked, but when it didn't, well.. it could be a pain. couple that with the vagaries of a token ring network!
Yup, the kids these days have no idea how good they have it. Most will never have to deal with MSDOS, NT, netware, scsi, token ring, floppies, zip drives, IO cards covered in never quite enough little jumpers or waiting a day for a low res render of a teapot on a chess board.
In response to the original picture request, I thought this PC was dirty enough for a blowing out. Clearly I'm not trying hard enough.
I vacuum my pcs pretty regularly. I don't have filthy pc pics to share. I think I'm in the wrong thread. Carry on!
those pictures gave me hives.
waiting a day for a low res render of a teapot on a chess board. ... sounds like the original povray!
Just sit back and watch. Enjoy the titilation of shadenfreude.
_ gee , some stack of dust , there _ good clean-up
Read This Discussion _ Thanx >>
Need advise on vacuum/blower _ by _ Daventaki
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/7486406/#Comment_7486406
thanx
...that was scary. Looked almost as if it was on fire with how black the dust was.
The really scary part is that if they spin fast enough the case can become airborne and injure passers by.
Imagine 1.0 on an Amiga. I used that and Vistapro for a couple of years and then bought a 486 which rendered about 50x faster. Also wanted to play Doom.
mmm I always spun mine blowing
I still have a copy of Vistapro.. it was pretty amazing back in the day..