Electronic postmortem

[The Mad Monk]

Did they check the power supply? Funky power supplies can cause all kinds of mischief.

[Elok]

It was probably just that the thing was filthy, combined with age. We'll be making a point of cleaning it from now on.

[Proteus_MST]

I had a HDD failure only once ... noticed it in time in the increasing number of R/W errors due to block failures and was able to transfer all important data to another HDD before it totally failed.
I also had an interesting failure of the power supply, together with lots of smoke

But never heard of a simultaneous failure of a HDD and the RAM.

[Bereta_Eder]

power supply failure is the most common I think but it is also easily discernible


you hear a loud fan rattling noise whereas there was no noise before.

Something is going on. duh.

so you change the poer supply and every is is ok


Dust accumulating is more of a silent killer though,

People complain about their PCs or laptops not working anymore


How could they when all their integral and necessairy parts are suffocating under tons of dust

No ventilation, overheating and finally BOOM. You have no PC/Laptop

It doesn't just "happen"

.Open the case or laptop, blow out the dust carefully and you give years of life to your computer

[The Mad Monk]

Rails in a power supply can go bad and start producing dirty power long before the fan goes. It may not even show a wrong voltage on the output, just transiant spikes that slowly but surely fry the microarcitecture in the chips, by literally burning through circuits. Or a rail can produce over- or under- voltage consistantly, and if nobody bothers to check, you can go through several "bad" boards before finding the real problem.

That said, a proper dusting once a year is a Very Good Idea. I like to pick a nice clear summer day (breezy is good too), bring all my computers out on the deck, put on a respirator and go at it with the canned air.

Protip: if you're frosting the components, back off.

[The Mad Monk]

If you have space behind an intake fan to put in a sheet of filter foam (prefilter foam?), by all means do so, but keep an eye on temps initially to make sure it isn't straining the system, and check the filter itself quarterly in any event.