Dirtiest Computer You've Ever Seen?

[Gerowen]

Got this idea from reading another unrelated post. What's the dirtiest computer you've ever come across (not porn, like dust and stuff). I wish I had a photo, but the dirtiest one I ever cleaned actually had dead cockroaches, and little bits of aluminium foil they had carried into the computer for a nest or something I guess. Stuck to the inside of the metal was tons of little roach turds, and the dust was so thick it had actually hardened into little cakes of black and brown. The inside of the computer smelled of cigarette smoke, and the floppy drive bay was so caked with dust you couldn't see into it. It's a wonder the poor computer hadn't just set itself on fire to escape from its life, lol.

[Frylock86]

Was this from my post? :D

I had a friend who had a circa 2001 Dell dimension that was just filled to dust and back. Every nook and cranny was full of it. The heat that built up inside actually cooked her hard drive, but the machine only died 2 years ago, so it had a good run.

[Unix2]

Here is this one:

[Gerowen]

Was this from my post? :D

Yes actually, :p. It just hit me how surprisingly dirty people can let their computers get.

[KyleGM]

Yes actually, :p. It just hit me how surprisingly dirty people can let their computers get.

I think people just think if it's clean on the outside it's fine, they forget that there's parts in the "box" :rofl:

[Frylock86]

Here is this one:

:x

[Jen Smith]

Nastiest one I ever had to deal with was back in the late 90's when I used to do hardware support. One of the clients was a rendering plant. The hardware was covered inside and out in this white dust. One of those jobs that aren't so bad when you go to your happy place and try not to think about it too much.

[Ironman273]

Worst one I saw was also in the early 90s when I had a computer company. A customer wanted their computer cleaned out. One of the slots in the back was missing its cover, usually no big deal. Apparently a rat thought the inside was a good place to have babies and forget about them. So I had to clean dead rat babies form the inside.

[Pierce28]

A laptop with live cockroaches crawling out the back vents. We sealed it up and gave it back.

...how do you get live cockroaches into a laptop!? Worst part is that the guy didn't even seem phased when we gave it back to him :unsure:

[redvamp128]

Nastiest one- though wish I had taken a picture of -- Two things about it--

1. Person Chain smoked

2. It had roaches on the inside (had to place it in a bag and spray it then let it sit)

[Max Veteran]

The complaint came in when the PC wouldn't boot. Reason? Hard drive cables had been chewed by a mouse, which not only had chewed various cables, but had peed and crapped many times everywhere. The stink was immense. I had to work on it out in the conservatory as I couldn't have it in the house.

[cleverclogs]

I cleaned one that had inches of dust and stunk of cigarettes... but at the front the main intake vent had accumulated about an inch of cat fur, so in the end it almost acted as its own filter. My how I wished I had an air compressor for cleaning that box.

[Valcrist]

I used to do PC repair at Circuit City before it went out of business so I had a few bad stories involving pest feces and cockroaches and miles of dust. However BY FAR the worst ever was a lady who brought in her laptop with "water damage" that came about from her (spoiler tagged for how nasty it is)

"live squirting web cam shows"

.

Of course she didn't let us know of this until AFTER we handled the laptop, Circuit paid for us to get STD tests just in-case ;).

[+Warwagon MVC]

The owner of this PC smoked in front of it.

[Denis W. Veteran]

I used to do PC repair at Circuit City before it went out of business so I had a few bad stories involving pest feces and cockroaches and miles of dust. However BY FAR the worst ever was a lady who brought in her laptop with "water damage" that came about from her (spoiler tagged for how nasty it is)

"live squirting web cam shows"

.

Of course she didn't let us know of this until AFTER we handled the laptop, Circuit paid for us to get STD tests just in-case ;).

That was totally NOT what I was guessing :rofl:

[Alan-]

I had one where the dust was completely caked on to everything and it smelled horribly of cigarettes and marijuana. Her issue was a bad power supply which had cooked due to so much dust. After changing out the power supply I decided I'd be a nice guy and clean out the rest of the system.

Turns out that fan on the processor had more or less "gotten used to" the amount of dust that after cleaning it, it was not used to the freedom and spinning just a bit too much, heh. I told the client it was fine, no complaints from her yet...

[Seizure1990]

Oh God, I hate people that smoke in front of their computers. You can ALWAYS tell. The dust is a sickly brown (I've seen some cases where it was VERY dark. They must have smoked a pack a day in front of those things) and whenever it's on, you can always smell the waft of stale cigarette butts coming out of the outtake vents.

The grossest computer, as far as it goes with "normal" dust situations, is some old Dell that must have come out of a mechanic's shop or something. Because other then the previously mentioned stench of cigarettes, the dust was also black and greasy, like it was covered in oil. Hence my assumption. It was a lot, too.

As for the "wtf" gross ones, I've had a few laptops with roaches and roach eggs, mouse feces (how the **** does a mouse get into a laptop anyways?!?), etc, but nothing compared to some of the other stories in here.

However, someone once literally shat on the floor of our store, so, uh... does that count?

[random_n]

I can think of quite a few adjectives to describe a token ring switch, but in this particular case, the best one would have been "irreplaceable". Around four years ago, this precise piece of irreplacable equipment needed replacement, and the only course was to upgrade what was possibly the most neglected network I have ever seen to the wonderful world of Ethernet.

The old Novell Netware server there was a 486DX2 which had quite clearly never been cleaned since the day it was installed. Somewhat surprisingly, there were no dead insects inside there. After picking it up to take outside and remove the dust, I found out it was because a spider was living in there under the PSU and keeping a handle on the situation. :laugh:

I don't think I'll be able to find the pictures since my old phone's storage card died (if I ever cared enough to back them up, I have no idea where to), but there was literally no way of discerning what any of the more intricate parts were ("the motherboard's probably at the bottom... maybe below that lump is the CPU..."). The dust was caked on the bottom and slightly fluffy up top, possibly an inch thick in some spots. This is pretty hard to accumulate without cigarette smoke, but they did it with nothing more than time and pressure. My instinct was to leave it alone; there were probably bits and bytes being routed straight through the layers of dust by this point, but I had a job to do and there was no way it could happen without cleaning the poor machine out.

Even outdoors, hitting that thing with the compressed air was like setting off a smoke grenade. Or, maybe, tear gas would be a more apt description, since I made the very unfortunate mistake of not checking the direction of the wind before my first blast. :wacko:

Half a can of air later (and MG Chemicals makes a serious can of air), the motherboard was green, the processor had a label, and I was able to install a slighly used PCI Ethernet card to upgrade the poor system from token ring. I have never been back to that facility, and indeed it's possible that no man of the IT cloth has been either. I'm not entirely sure whether I better like the idea of the whole network being replaced with modern, interoperable and manageable systems, or everything having been lost in time with only the minimum of changes needed to keep it alive. Maybe fate will bring me back there one day, and I might even get to meet the great great great descendent of the spider that lives under the PSU.

[Robbie Ride]

I usually get asked by friends and family to repair their computers which usually involves stripping the system and cleaning all out cos things get really bad.

The one that stood out was a friend who i had known for years and always complained about his computer not working but did nothing about it, so i happened to be at his house one day and i decided that i would attempted to determine the problem and possibly fix it, we sit it up onto his coffee table that was covered in news papers to protect it and i proceeded to open the side of the unit anld to be honest i wish i never, every componant was covered in at least an inch of thick spongy dust that would have probably absorbed water if you dropped them into a full sink.

Normally what i would do with a computer when cleaning is to remove some componants and heatsink/fan unit clean with a small unused soft paintbrush and pop back into place, but not that time, i had to strip the whole thing down to a hollow shell, clean it from top to bottom and re-assemble. What i never expected was that the bloody computer had died, what killed was that there was so much thick dust between the CPU/Heatsink and Heatsink/Fan that there was no cooling being provided so it burnt itself out completely.

My friend thought that if i gave it enough C.P.R i would be able to revive it, don't think he understood it was D.O.A and i shouldn't have bothered working on it.

I can explain to my friends until i'm blue in the face that they need to look after their computers, but cry foul when it goes and dies.

[bjoswald]

Love threads like these because we can all relate and contribute to them.

Anyway, the worst one I have ever seen didn't have any dead rats or roach eggs in it, but I found a cigarette butt, a dead beetle (no idea what it was, but it wasn't a roach), and a ton of caked-on debris. The stuff looked like dust,

but came off in this weird, sticky powdery film (kind of like Cheetos) and was a PITA to wash off. Needless to say, it took a long time to get everything clean. Not only that, but the drives were wired wrong and one of the fans were

dying. The guy I was cleaning it for had no clue (of course), but I spent a good five or ten minutes explaining the fundamentals of cleaning a PC. I can only hope it didn't go in one ear and out the other.

[Magnolia Man]

sum old ones i saw long time ago

[Robbie Ride]

Love threads like these because we can all relate and contribute to them.

Anyway, the worst one I have ever seen didn't have any dead rats or roach eggs in it, but I found a cigarette butt, a dead beetle (no idea what it was, but it wasn't a roach), and a ton of caked-on debris. The stuff looked like dust,

but came off in this weird, sticky powdery film (kind of like Cheetos) and was a PITA to wash off. Needless to say, it took a long time to get everything clean. Not only that, but the drives were wired wrong and one of the fans were

dying. The guy I was cleaning it for had no clue (of course), but I spent a good five or ten minutes explaining the fundamentals of cleaning a PC. I can only hope it didn't go in one ear and out the other.

I think it probably did go in one ear and out of the other, when your explaining to someone the seemingly complex task of looking after a computer and they stare at you like your transparent then you've completely lost them. i find that alot.

[qdave]

Those are some nasty ones..wow :D dirtiest pc i saw was probably mine, because i didn't clean it for over a year...but its nothing like those!

[Burned]

Ed's Super Fix-It - For all your computer repair needs

[Gerowen]

sum old ones i saw long time ago

I'll have to admit, I've never actually found a mummified rat glued to the inside of a computer before. That's a new one. I did however, when our first house burned, find a mummified possum in the flooring of the trailer we bought afterward. In order just to have a house, we went out and spent like $2k on a really old trailer, and proceeded to start gutting and building it up and into a house. While we were ripping out all the old floor insulation, we found a mummified possum that had somehow gotten between the floorboard and the insulation, gotten stuck, and died. We painted it blue and hung it next to a tree out by the mailbox, :p