Dust Bunnies are Evil

I know this seems like a mundane task that most of us are admonished to do on a regular basis, but it really does need to be repeated: Blow your computers cases out once in a while, especially if they get dusty.

We all know that heat sinks and fans lose their effectiveness when dusty leading to potential overheating, but there's a worse possibility. I ran into a system last week that had dust bunnies in it-- nothing out of the ordinary, except that one of them had lodged itself into the video card's tiny fan. The user reported a blue screen indicating video driver failure. I was busy and asked him to reboot since this was a first time thing. He came back shortly after reporting that it happened again, and now the system couldn't POST. A single dust bunny had lodged in a tight fan, causing the fan to jam, burning out the motor. The video card (a Quadra, unfortunately) then overheated to the point of death. Odd stuff like this can absolutely happen, without showing general signs of overheating.

To be fair, the opposite is true. It's possible you might dislodge some conductive dust which might land in an inopportune spot, causing problems. That can typically be fixed pretty easily with a second cleaning. A burnt out video card, northbridge, etc. can be a lot more costly.