[tlug] Dust busters?

[Darren Cook <darren@example.com>]

I wondered if there is such a thing as a very small, very powerful
vacumn cleaner? Something that will suck all the dust out of the inside
of my notebook.

My dell notebook (2.5 years old) sometimes overheats and suddenly shuts
down. And it is getting worse. (*)

I've opened up the case, as much as I can, to clean out dust, but cannot
really get in to where the fans are. It is still under (4 year)
guarantee, so I'm not going to go in any more aggressively.

Hence the vacumn idea. It has to be powerful enough to suck the dust
through the case air vents. A quick search on Amazon made me wonder if
such a thing even exists? Or any other suggestions?

Darren


*: I made my own temperature monitoring alarm. Last year it would die
when it was getting over 70 degrees, so I had the alarm set to about 63
degrees. And it only ever triggered when doing some heavy-duty data
analysis or converting a movie file format.

But this year it has died when the temperature is "only" in the high
fifties. So I've reduced the alert to 56 degrees. The problem now is it
will go off when just using email, or watching a video! (On a normal
desk, not on my lap or anything like that.) It went off in an
air-conditioned Starbucks yesterday.

It is getting so I have to use the USB-powered fan all the time now. And
we're only in May!