Dust Bunnies of DOOM!

The power supply on my router has been dying for a while. The ball bearings on the fan have been making horrible buzzing noises and the time to replace it had come, so this afternoon I opened the case and prepared for surgery: transferring the hard drive and network cards into an older, slightly slower (it's still a P2 and it's fine for routing, nobody cares) PC.

When I opened the case on the old one while it was still running, I found a colony of vicious dust bunnies living within. I pulled out my trusty blower, but before I pulled the trigger I noticed something: the fan on top of the CPU wasn't spinning. A huge dust bunny had wedged itself into the works and was preventing the fan from spinning. A blast from the duster and it started right up. It's too bad I couldn't do that with the power supply, but it was dead.

A similar problem had hit my desktop a couple of weeks ago, and it had resulted in rapid overheat and shutdown. But this old P2 was still chugging along even though neither the power supply fan nor the CPU fan worked. I wasn't asking very much of it, true, but it was still impressive.

I swapped the cards and the disk drive, and the router happily accepted its new memory and CPU constraints. We got back on line in less than twenty minutes.