I’ve been doing IT since the late 80’s and I can say I’ve pretty much seen stuff like in those pictures. Some of the worst clogging was when I was actually working at a hospital. I couldn’t understand why the inside of the computer cases were getting completely clogged with dust. After talking to guys that have been at the hospital for years, I found out it wasn’t dust, but lint from all the sheets used in the rooms. I guess it makes its way all the way to the offices. Hospital patient lint. Yay.
Lint is amazing. Perhaps I should say our lungs are really amazing! Have a customer that makes clothing. Used to open the computers at least once a year and blow all the lint out. Amazing how much got in to the office which was separated by doors and a break room from the factory where the cloth was cut and sewn. You can imagine that clothing manufacturing is not high margin;-) They still have macs on the factory floor, accomplishing useful work, after ingesting huge amounts of lint, for over 20 years! It is usually the PSU that takes them out but if that doesn’t fail a hard drive about every decade or so and they just keep going. Old debate about this, and I disagree completely in terms of the environment, but it sure looks to me like powering up and down has the most significant effect on shortening the life of the computer. These old machines that keep running year after year don’t get turned off.
I have mint on a dual boot windows machine and it has stopped accepting my PW and I don’t know enough about to fix it. Don’t get a wrong PW notice but goes right back to log on screen.
C
This shows you how you can change your root/user passwords on your Mint instance.
True story, but anecdotal…
In the days before cell phones had cameras, I worked for a computer sales and service company. They preferred dealing with big clients if they could, but had a bunch of small companies that they had sold gear to, so we - the technical guys - got to support the old PCs and servers in these offices. Many were lawyers, and from my experience at least, a lawyer will not buy anything for their office until they absolutely have to.
We got a call on a Monday morning that “The printers won’t print anything,” from one such office. Normally it would have been my beat, but I was busy with another client. One of the other guys went down to the client’s office to see if they could figure out the problem, with the advisory to call me if it wasn’t something simple. About an hour later, I got a call from the other tech, who was apparently sitting in his car in the parking lot. He was there because he had figured out the problem quite quickly, but simply couldn’t stay in the office due to the circumstance.
According to him, the server had shut itself down over the weekend (it had been warm, and of course, no lawyer will pay to air-condition an office that’s empty over the weekend). When he examined it he found that the printers all depended on the server, which was housed inside a credenza that supported three dot-matrix and one laser printer on their top surface. All the boxes of tractor-feed paper for the dot-matrix units were stored within the credenza to keep everything tidy. He decided that he’d take a look inside the server (I think it was a Compaq ProSignia) after powering it on produced a brief, very muffled-sounding hum and no output to a screen.
He took the server tower outside with him “To clean it up a bit” and to call me. Without a camera there was no way to actually prove this, but his claim was that the entirety of the inside of the computer case was filled with “A custom-fitted, wall-to-wall dust bunny that looked like it was big enough to break itself free and escape over the fence!” The multi-year accumulation of paper dust had been carefully kept away from the printers by filtering through, or more accurately in to, the server. It overheated, finally, and shut down when the room got a little warm over the weekend.
The tech had gone outside not so much to clean the server out and call me, but so he wouldn’t embarass himself or the client by almost falling down laughing at the sight of the completely full space inside the box. A few blasts of canned air and a couple of healthy shakes, and the server powered right back up - ran for at least three more years after that, too.
I have to agree with you on the powering up and down. Spindle hard drives a lot of times will fail just like a light bulb. It works fine one day, you properly shutdown and then the next day it just won’t spin up. When I used to work on the old Mac Plus and SE’s, while customers were waiting for a new hard drive to come in, you could actually see the spindle between the drive and its driver board and give it a little nudge with a flat head screwdriver and it would spin up. I would tell them to not turn it off until we get the new drive in.
One place where I worked for a very short time, thankfully, I opened up the ’puter for… some reason, don’t even recall why.
It was pack with a single amorphous dustbunny that filled every single crevice: between card-connectors, in/around the fan, actually between RAM SIMMs/DIMMs, in the disk cage, everywhere.
I started picking out clumps of it with my fingertips and dropping it into the garbage-can, using a pen to pry out clumps of fur that were lodged in crevices, etc.
Boss-Man walks over, watches for a few seconds, and then tells me to leave it alone. Not as in “Nah, you don’t have to bother with that, just leave it alone”, but as “No, stop that immediately and leave it alone”.
The shocked look on my face, repeating “Whut? Leave it alone??”, prompted him to tell me that “it’s fine if you leave things alone, because if you ‘disturb’ anything inside, it’ll break things”.
Ooooookay.
I’m sure all the components inside that were suffering ongoing heat-stroke would beg to differ, though.
This lady brought in her sons IBM PC XT that had been sitting in a shed while he was away at college. He came home and wanted to use it, but it wouldn’t turn on so that is why she brought it in. My service manager was the lucky one to get to work on that one. He opened it up, took one look at us and said “Get Back!”. We all stepped back and he sprayed the inside with Raid. About 100 Florida Cockroaches (Palmetto bugs) went crazy for a few minutes before they died. I think that’s one of the nastiest ones I’ve seen.
Back as a kid when I worked at The Shack Of Radios, one old dewd brought in an ancient table-radio or clock-radio, forgot. Cracked it open, a large family of cockaroaches flew out and scattered all over the store like runaways balls of mercury. People were yelling “Get that tf outta here!!”, and the guy just nonchalantly stuffed it back into his bag and walked out like… nothing. We hosed down the entire store with cans of bugspray that probably reduced the lifespan of everyone in the area by about 10yrs.
I guess i should have added a /s to my post (pun intended) as it was a joke. If the computer is dead for some reason like power supply failure or blown capacitor or failed ram chip or dead CMOS battery or whatever it won’t get past the POST, hence won’t boot up.
For those who like humour this website has many hilarious computer jokes (form the old days).
Support ends on 10/14/2025. We have some time left.
-Thomas, i5 7200U, quite happy with Win10 and hoping, his laptop (only recently upgraded to SSD) will last as long as Win10
I’ve heard/read from multiple electrical engineers and electronics technicians that most circuits get a power surge when they’re powered on. That may not be the only reason, but it’s one of the reasons powering up a lot reduces the lifetime of a computer.
I’ve had enough incandescent bulbs die with a “pop” when turning them on, that it rings true, even if Bob Pease’s explanation wasn’t enough.
Ha! I met Bob Pease a bunch of years ago in Plainview. He was every bit the character in person as he was in print. 
Imagine he flew, and didn’t take his old Beetle, to get here.
I had a Dell XPS 15 laptop at work for a while. I didn’t use it like a laptop is supposed to be used, though. I just left it plugged in, folded up, and powered on 24/7. After probably 12-18 months of that, I started having a weird issue. The mouse would just randomly jump around. I would be typing along, and suddenly the window I was typing in would lose focus because the mouse just moved out of it. I know it wasn’t me, because I had both hands on the keyboard.
I’m a hard-core linux user, so I was searching online, checking the usb and mouse drivers, and trying to figure out what I had changed. This went on for a couple of very frustrating weeks. Finally I unfolded the screen for some completely unrelated purpose and noticed that the battery had swollen and pushed touch pad up so it was randomly being contacted by the bezel around the screen.
The help desk replaced the battery, and gave my laptop to a more deserving developer. I now have a NUC running 24/7 on my desktop. It has not been possessed by evil spirits yet.
The kindest gift you can buy any wall powered PC is a good UPS.
Not sexy, hides under a desk, batteries croak every 3 years.
BUT it will protect a system from all sorts of problems.
Especially now that so many systems are on 24/7.
Power outages usually happen after business hours and on weekends here for some reason.
I used to bully my customers into buying one if I could get away with it.
The elegant PC shutdown from a UPS sure beats what happens during brownouts and power surges.
Especially if the system just happens to be in the middle of a big fat update.
All the Best,
Jeff
I guess I’m in the minority for turning my PC off when I’m not using it. Booting from an SSD is so fast it’s barely an inconvenience. I try to keep my internet bill down and this seems like an easy way to do it.
A friend of mine who set up systems for business clients would insist on dedicated UPSes for each unit, else the entire deal was off.
He wasn’t about to give any warranty for a system that could get fried by lousy power.
I have a good UPS for my desktop, and another one for my PS3/PS4.
That way if the power goes out, I hopefully have enough time to save my game on my video game system. 
Jeff… what a horror show! Man, I can’t imagine how depressing it must be, having to face a computer so poorly treated.
I used to be the “in house” tech for my family. I was good about being proactive with computers in our house. With PC’s, I’d periodically open up the cases and evacuate all of the dust & lint accumulation. I would also change the motherboard coin cell battery every 2 years, whether it needed it or not. Clean the mouse rollers. Defrag hard drives. Purge junk & temp files. But it was an uphill battle trying to get them to cooperate on folder naming, hierarchy, and file names. My mother once had some documents she couldn’t find. Somehow, she’d manage to pad a huge amount of blank spaces in front. So in the document list view, you’d not even see the names.
Thankfully, those days are long gone. Everyone has laptops. And I really don’t care about how they maintain their files—they’re on their own! And, Windows 10 has been very reliable, easy to maintain.
Speaking of SSD’s, that’s the only reason why I have laptops that are 7 and 9 years old respectively. 16Gb of RAM and a reputable SSD? Huge difference. Anyway, the casing and bezel of my primary laptop have gotten so well worn… now looking at another laptop. I just don’t want to fork out $200 in parts for an existing laptop that I could put towards a replacement. Seriously no need to buy brand new, given how powerful and capable hardware has become over the past 5+ years. I’ve been an HP guy for over 15 years. Not the best quality casings, but they’ve been very reliable and easy to maintain. But a friend of mine has a Dell and I just upgraded her old SSD to a larger one (it wasn’t a simple deal—needed to buy an external enclosure in order to clone the old drive). Impressive materials quality. And despite complaints I’ve read about Dell keyboards, this one is good.
I live in South Florida. I have a UPS on every pc in the house, and all A/V equipment has APC Surge Protectors. We should be getting those afternoon Thunderstorms rolling in pretty soon, getting to be that time of year.