Back From The Dead!

So ya know that feeling when you are... like... sitting in a chair... for a very long time... and then suddenly you leap up only to discover in despair that your legs had fallen asleep and you fall on your face?

This blog is totally feeling that now...

Forgive me for I have sinned (and lets hope I stay a little more in touch this time...)...

So much has changed around here... where to start???

Oh yeah! Remember that XPS 420 project I did? That cheap Intel E5200 processor mixed with a little repair kit yielded 4.16 GHz overclock on a basic, BIOS-locked Dell! Well Amy got retired to another family and Shasta took over as the server downstairs. Now 2TB worth of drive space over twin networks serves the house and slowly over the internet with Opera web server. Its so nice not having to worry about running out of power! Even after 3 months of HARD running and computing, I've yet to experience one freeze or blip. When instructions-per-second counts... this desktop doesnt do so bad!

Okay, what else? I hope everyone had a GREAT Christmas break and enjoyed a Happy New Year as well! I sure needed the time off of school... However I spent a lot of my time working. Everybody was having their PC's repaired and I put quite a few hours in working tech support. Here's an important lesson for everyone to pull away from this story:

I received a PC that wouldnt boot and they wondered if it could be saved... Pulling off the side panel this is what I found... Dust, dust, and more dust! Even when I pulled the panel off a small cloud of dust came erupting out of the case. Its fair to say this thing had been overheating for several years now. In fact after removing the dust and pushing some messy cables aside, I found a dozen capacitors that had blown or swelled, which is basically a nail in the coffin for any computer.
I was able to recover the data... but as for the rest of the tower now it only serves as a harsh reminder of the loss of quite an investment only because nobody had ever run a $2 can of compressed air through it.

If you own a desktop, please dont let this happen to you!

I suppose this brings me to my question: If you own a computer (you almost must if you are reading this), how often do you clean it thoroughly (blow the dust out and all)? And if you havent.... why not?