I have been doing some real cleaning out of my computers and you wouldn’t believe the debris that collects behind the shiny black casing!

The manuals state this cleaning should be done every six months, but I usually do every four.

Mainly, dear readers, because the atmosphere in this house is unbearable if my technology goes down. All of a sudden there are hundreds of important, to say nothing of urgent, letters to be typed, emails to be done and, of course, zombies to be slayed, and games to be played!

Mother is stalking around pulling her hair out because the correspondence is stacking up, and I am not a popular guy with my team mates online.

When I ran my computer repair business you wouldn’t believe the dust, pet hair and various pens, lollipops etc that would spill out of their machines. How anyone could expect the poor machine to work with no room even for the fans to spin!

One particular customer brought in an already geriatric computer complaining it was getting hot and incredibly slow.

Well, i’m not surprised.

On opening the casing there was a solid wall of compacted dust and dog hair. It was so tightly packed I had to prise it out forcibly chunk by chunk.

How a fire wasn’t caused I do not know. I finished the job and all was well. I thought. A few days later when I gave the customer a courtesy call she told me it was now ‘too fast’ and she was going to buy a new one!!

I learned a lot about how people lived in that business. I enjoyed it, but when I think how a simple thing like a basic clean could have saved them hundreds of pounds it was frustrating. The best and funniest comment I had from a lady bringing in her laptop?

‘I’ve lost all my files. I slammed the lid shut too hard’.

No, really!! How I kept a straight face I will never know.

Even just opening the case and giving a good hard blow will give your machine a longer life.

And you stand less chance of being ripped off by the many unscrupulous repair companies!

Simples.