Hey guys. I've had this computer, an HP Pavilion a450n for roughly five years now. It is a beast, its got like 40 memory card readers, a floppy drive (!) two USB 1.0 and one Firewire port on the front. Its got a DVD-r and CD Drive. On the inside, well thats where it sucks, I have a P4 3.0, 512mb of PC3200 DDR running at 200mhz 3-3-3-8Cycle Time, 180 Gigs of Hard Drive space, A rockin' Asus P4SD-LA, best of all, it is sporting a Nvidia AGP FX5200 at 128MB!
(so for all the fools i own in source upgrading your won't make you better!)
Okay so lets get past the specs of my Tasmanian Devil in a HP Case. I have not cleaned it once since i got it, nor have I even opened it up to see what it looked like. I am offering you this one chance to see what 5 years of dust can do to your computer, this includes one year in dorms, the dustiest places in the world.
So lets take a look at the before shot. (First pic)
Yeah its pretty dusty, nothing some Q-tips cannot handle! ..maybe 20 q-tips? (Second Pic)
And here is what the fan looked like after a few minutes of scraping caked on dust off of. We'll come back to this later, I have a question for you. (Third Pic)
Lets take a look at the final product, forgot to get a close up, so you'll have to squint. (Fourth Pic)
And an Ariel shot brought to you by the Hood Blimp. (Fifth Pic)
Now I know you guys want to see my desktop, so I attached a screen of it, and also a screen of Everest running on my computer. Normally running at 60+ Degrees i am down to a nice 40! (Sixth and Seventh Pic)
Okay, so I got a nice new monitor (22" Acer 1000:1, 5ms), well it costs more than my computer. But what I was wondering, my Cooler Master Fan that I attached in this thread had a back filter behind the blades, and it completely covered in dust, so I was wondering if that is killing my ventilation. Is there anything i can do about it? Get a new one, cleaning methods, I don't know.
Also, is it dangerous to run the computer without having the side case on? That seems to keep it A LOT cooler.
All right thanks for coming along on my adventure, hope you enjoyed it at my expense!
P.S. If anyone knows how to make the pictures go after the descriptions rather than how they are now, let me know!
-Jim D
