At 2:39 AM -0600 2/1/02, Darren Reed wrote:
>In some email I received from Rick Kelly, sie wrote:
[...]
>> One thing about Sun boxes, is that they do seem to suck in dust,
>> especially Sun3. About once a year I blow out the inside of my Sun3
>> and sparc boxes with compressed air.
>
>I think this is true of any computer that you run 24x7.

Workstations tend to have beefier cooling systems that suck a lot more air
(and dust) through the case, though.

My SGI Indigo2 could have been co-branded by Hoover with the amount of dust
it sucks in. Ditto for my PowerMac 9600, though that's partly because I
have it on the floor.

I've found that average PCs need anywhere from a dusting every two years,
to yearly dustings, while my workstations demand at least one dusting every
6 months, the worst probably being my Indigo R3k, which will start to flake
out after about 3 months from dust.

Perhaps the worst I've seen, though, was an HP NetServer E60, which after 6
months of use managed to collect *large dustbunnies* in the bottom of the
case. Worst buildup I saw was in a home PC that hadn't been dusted for
maybe 3 or 4 years in a home with pets, the shrouded slot-1 PII heatsink
was caked solid from plate to fintips in dust, and the powersupply wasn't
much prettier.


Cheers - Tony 'Nicoya' Mantler :)


--
Tony "Nicoya" Mantler - Renaissance Nerd Extraordinaire - nicoya@apia.dhs.org
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada           --           http://nicoya.feline.pp.se/