I was told, when I arrived on site, that this computer had just been cleaned the previous day. I could quickly tell that the cleaning had not been complete to our standards. When I opened up the computer, I just had to take a picture for the web site. Yes, those are dust bunnies under the front cover nearly covering the cooling fan ports. And the inside was coated in a thick layer of dust. However, the rear cooling fan blades were actually fairly clean. Apparently they had used a can of compressed air on that single fan only from outside the case. After cleaning all of the dust out of the inside and improving the air flow through the CPU cooling fins, it resulted in lowering the CPU operating temperature some 30 degrees farenheit. This could easily have resulted in a fire in the very near future as the temperatures got hotter and the flammable dust got thicker. If one of your computers failed because of heat, and you lost access to your data, could you recover your business operations? Any thoughts on your backups, offsite archives, and business continuity planning? In addition to those concepts, maybe including a quarterly preventive maintenance contract that could reduce the potential fire hazard would be in order. Give us a call or email, and let us help you manage your systems, so they don't manage you.

By the way, I recommended more frequent cleanings for all of their computer and network systems.

Submitted by TK