Was it the Dust?

I did a post a couple months ago about networking a couple of computers.

Everything has been working well with the old one during this time.

Until two nights ago.

It just turned itself right off in the middle of using my photoshop program.

I tried to boot it back up, and it would just get past the initial boot, then it would shut off again.

After the third time, I couldn't even get it to boot up anymore.

I tried several times over the last two days to get it to do something - but no go.

I got to thinking, a couple of night before this happened, I heard the hard drive making a high pitched noise as I cycled through some photos in the Windows Photo browser.

I figured now that the hard drive was on its way out.

This computer is almost 10 years old, and it has been used a lot.

So today I decided to take a look at the innards and see if anything was obviously wrong - an unplugged component or maybe something literally "fried".

The only thing that really stood out to me once the casing was off was the amount of dust.

There were even strings of it connecting everything in there.

Out came the vacuum and the can of compressed air.

It certainly looked much better after the cleaning, I was hoping it was feeling just as good too.

So far, so good.

It has booted up and stayed on for a half an hour now.

I can only hope it was the dust!