P4man

It doesn't need petrol, oil or spring tuneups, but your computer does need preventive maintenance.

Without regular maintenance, your PC may fail, sputter and grind to a halt, leaving you stranded on the soft shoulder of the Information Highway...

Dust, dirt and grime can lead to serious problems with your PC. The chips and circuits in your system have two mortal enemies; heat and corrosion...If your system is located in a hermetically sealed, climate controlled office, cleaning once a year may suffice.
In dust prone areas however, having your system cleaned every three to six months will add years to the life of your PC.

Regular cleaning of you PC is very important, the images show a PC that is a little over 12 months old and the dust that had collected inside in that time.


Dust is a conductor of electricity and is responsible for many computer failures.
Beside the fact that dust could damage your computer beyond repair you could also lose all your data.

This imaged shows that CPU fan clogged with dust preventing efficient cooling of the CPU. This could cause CPU failure due to overheating.

A build up of dust throughout the computer could start a fire or short circuit permanently damaging sensitive components in your PC.

Viruses and what are they
In computer security technology, a virus is a self-replicating program that spreads by inserting copies of itself into other executable code or documents. A computer virus behaves in a way similar to a biological virus, which spreads by inserting itself into living cells. Extending the analogy, the insertion of a virus into the program is termed as an infection and the infected file (or executable code that is not part of a file) is called a host. Viruses are one of the several types of malicious software or malware. In a common parlance, the term virus is often extended to refer to worms, Trojan horses and other sorts of malware; however, this can confuse computer users, since viruses in the narrow sense of the word are less common than they used to be, compared to other forms of malware. This confusion can have serious consequences, because it may lead to a focus on preventing one genre of malware over another, potentially leaving computers vulnerable to future damage. However, a basic rule is that computer viruses cannot directly damage hardware, but only software.

While viruses can be intentionally destructive (for example, by destroying data), many other viruses are fairly benign or merely annoying. Some viruses have a delayed payload, which is sometimes called a bomb. For example, a virus might display a message on a specific day or wait until it has infected a certain number of hosts. A time bomb occurs during a particular date or time, and a logic bomb occurs when the user of a computer takes an action that triggers the bomb. However, the predominant negative effect of viruses is their uncontrolled self-reproduction, which wastes or overwhelms computer resources.
Spyware and how they can affect you
In the field of computing, the term spyware refers to a broad category of malicious software designed to intercept or take partial control of a computer's operation without the informed consent of that machine's owner or legitimate user. While the term taken literally suggests software that surreptitiously monitors the user, it has come to refer more broadly to software that subverts the computer's operation for the benefit of a third party.

Spyware differs from viruses and worms in that it does not usually self-replicate. Like many recent viruses, however, spyware – by design – exploits infected computers for commercial gain. Typical tactics furthering this goal include delivery of unsolicited pop-up advertisements; theft of personal information (including financial information such as credit card numbers); monitoring of Web-browsing activity for marketing purposes; or routing of HTTP requests to advertising sites..