Like everyone, you've heard (at length) about the dangers of viruses, malware and trojans, and taken all kinds of precautions. You've been advised about the kinds of crashes that can occur if you don't defrag your hard drive from time to time, and you defrag assiduously. You've been told about all those suspicious emails that are phishing for your banking and credit card information and zap them as soon as they hit your inbox.

But I'll bet that few of you have heard about dust. Yeah, dust.

I hadn't. So Friday afternoon while blithely typing away the Blue Screen of Death appeared on my monitor (first time in 25 years). And then everything went blank. Black and dead. Couldn't reboot. Couldn't do anything.

Found a guy Saturday morning willing to work weekends for no extra pay. Gave him my tower. Heard from him two hours later. My CPU had burned out, which in turn had fried my motherboard. Because I hadn't cleaned the innards of my machine since I bought it, three and a half years ago. As you might imagine, a dead CPU and motherboard means having to buy a new machine. Luckily I'd bought a spare for Mrs. Ygrec, who insisted, though she never thereafter even learned how to turn it on.

Dust can and will collect inside your desktop or laptop, around your CPU and the little fan that desperately tries to keep things cool. But CPU's run hot, and if you don't help them get rid of the heat, they'll blow up. To keep yourself safe, all you have to do is have one of those little cans of compressed air handy, open your box or laptop, spray the CPU and fan, and you're done! I actually had the compressed air cans, but I didn't clean my box!

If you DON'T do that, you can get into my kind of mess. Although there was a spare handy, it's a 32-bit machine, compared to my 64-bit, which causes all kinds of trouble. And you still have to pay someone to transfer your stuff to the other machine. Unless you're a techie, which I'm not. And after you transfer the stuff you have to spend about a week setting everything up again.

Not pleasant. Buy the compressed air. Clean your machine several times a year. Be safe.