Dust and dog hair

Have you ever worked in an office building? They tend to be fairly blissful places to work in the summer time. Of course, if given the choice, I'd be "working" on the beach with a margarita on one knee and a laptop on the other. But if you must work somewhere during the summer, an office building isn't a bad place to be since it's usually air-conditioned.

HVAC systems translate to circulating air and often some sort of filtration system. This same filtration is happily going on throughout the winter as the heat keeps you warm. The cleaning staff in these buildings is not generally occupied with cleaning up vomit, either. All of which means that the average office building is a whole heck of a lot less dusty than the average school (or the average home, for that matter).

Which leads me to my wacky computer story of the day. My superintendent called me into his office noting that his laptop was unresponsive. A hard restart brought us to the POST a couple of times, but the laptop kept turning itself off. Although it was sitting in a dock unobstructed on a desk, the notebook was hot. Really hot. With a few mumbled words of reassurance about thermal protection mechanisms, I took the laptop back to my office and broke out the small vacuum I use for cleaning computers. It's a slick little Oreck that can be switched to a blower. I fired it up and hit the air intake, figuring the fan was a bit obstructed and was greeted with a dust cloud of epic proportions usually reserved for long-neglected servers.

Woops. OK, time to take it apart completely and see just how much dust I'd sprayed across the various internal components (Note to self: only use vacuum mode from now on, especially on the boss's laptop). As the various modules came out, so did more dust and a fair amount of dog hair. No wonder the CPU overheated.

This really isn't bad after the ant colony I removed from a teacher laptop a couple of years ago, but it was remarkably dirty. Far dirtier than one might have expected from an 18-month old laptop. Desktop PCs that sit under a teacher's desk? Sure, those won't be pretty, but a plain old laptop? Welcome to Dust Central. There's another job for the techs this summer: laptop cleanings, whether it looks like they need them or not. With a vacuum.