Reminds me of a “customer” who brought a PC to our computer club. He had bought a Soundblaster, had it plugged in as the instructions showed, and it did not work.

To note, we did not let him inside, because our club was strictly non-smoking, and this guy fired up the next cigarette with the stump of the last one…

Well, the computer, especially the inside, looked like expected. The mainboard and everything else was covered in a sticky brown layer. Except for the still new Soundblaster card. As it was our charter, we took on the case. Our club chemist cooked up some odd liquid while we disassembled the sad machine. Gloves were definitely needed, we took out the mainboard after unscrewing by placing the gloved hands flat on it and lifting it out only with the stickyness of the thing.

The stuff our club chemist had made worked flawlessly. A day later, the liquid was brown, and the board and other components were sparking clean and still worked after drying. The only thing we did not clean that way was the harddrive.

I wish I’d thought to take a photo of a computer I cleaned in 2010. It had been sent to the recycler I worked for from a factory as it had stopped working, and I opened the case to see what sort of components it had.

It was a mid sized ATX tower case, and was literally filled with dust. I don’t mean that there was lots of dust, I mean I couldn’t see any of the internals. I took the side panel off, and it looked like someone had filled the case with foam.

The business next door sold cars, and had an air compressor, so me and the guy who ran it took it in turns blowing the dust out. I never found out what the specs were, as even the PSU was full, and I didn’t want to risk turning it on, even after cleaning it.