My Laptop Gets a Blow Job

My laptop was getting more obnoxious by the week. Progressively getting slower, taking longer to boot up, taking longer for pretty much everything except aggravating my temper. All the symptoms of a STD. But my battery of free security programs found nothing. I caved in and bought Spysweeper. It found nothing, either, and just made things even slower.

I started noticing it felt hotter than it used to under my right wrist. Well, okay, I thought, it is over five years old, after all. Probably getting ready to blow the power supply or something. Before it could do that, though, it started just shutting itself off. They’re made that way, y’know, to automatically shut down when the internal temperature gets too high.

Of course, by now I was primed to use the imminent demise of the machine as an excuse to get a new one. Even started checking the BestBuy ads every Sunday. But, the damn thing wouldn’t die; just kept after my goat. Last weekend I asked my wife if it would upset her if I got out the .38 and shot it. She said it would. So, I scrapped the notion of putting it out of my misery.

Today it shut itself down before I could print a letter I needed to get out. So I turned it over to have a look at the fans. A busted fan could certainly cause overheating. Couldn’t tell anything from squinting through the tiny holes except the blades looked kind of dusty. I grabbed a can of Dust-Off and shot a blast at each fan. The first result was a major cloud of dust flying out the vent. The second result was one of the fans didn’t spin. It occurred to me laptops maybe store up dust as well as desktops, despite what seems to be a fairly enclosed structure. And it occurred to me I might need to replace a fan. Fans are what I’ve had to replace the most on all my computers.

I can see you’re about to fall asleep so I’ll cut to the chase. At home after supper between Olympic events I removed as many panels as I was comfortable removing and used about half a can of Dust-Off blowing into strategic crevices. In the process, I not only blew out more clouds of dust but also dislodged a major dust-kitty that I had to slowly work out with tweezers from behind one of the fans. Yup, it was actually keeping the fan from spinning. Got it all back together and the difference is incredible.

Sounds way better, stays way cooler, runs way faster, hasn’t shut off. Keeping fingers crossed, of course, but it’s looking (and sounding) like I’ll have to spill a cup of coffee into the keyboard if I’m gonna get me a new laptop in the near future.

Stinkin’ dirt, anyway.