I am of the opinion that computers have personalities. Very much like an old car that you have to sweet talk, I think computers need the same type of tender loving care. I believe that when they feel neglected or that you are taking them for granted, they will suddenly have an “issue”. Most often, the issue is something small, and very fixable, but is guaranteed to annoy you the most, or take the longest to find the “easy” answer to fix it.

For many weeks my computer has had an overheating problem. I scanned and rescanned my computer for viruses, malware, and anything that might have been causing the overheating problem. Nothing worked. I decided that the problem had to be a hardware problem then.

Great…I am not an expert when it comes to computers, but I can usually figure most software out, however, I am totally lost when it comes to hardware. My computer knows this. This was its way of messing with my head and causing me extreme frustration. If I could not figure out exactly how and why my computer was over heating, I knew I would have to spend a lot of money at the computer repair shop having its insides fixed.

Because I also believe sometimes if you ignore a problem it will “fix itself”, I chose not to do anything about the overheating problem right away. You can predict the results. My computer, again tired of being ignored, decided to crank the pressure up a notch and the overheating problem became worse.

Early this morning, I once again ran all sorts of scans on my computer, with nothing being found. I decided it was time to show my computer who was the boss around here. I did a quick search on overheating problems in laptops. The most common cause appears to be improper air circulation due to a build up of dust and debris. The only thing I could think of was “Duh!”

I read through a couple of instructions on how to clean a laptop, they all recommended that air in a can stuff. Of course, there is none of that around here. However, me the asthmatic, who apparently lacks common sense decided it would be a wise decision to just put my mouth close to the air vents and blow and blow as hard as I could.

The good news is that my lungs must be doing good because I did not turn blue while I was blowing stuff out of my laptop. As I am blowing, I can see all kinds of debris coming out of my laptop. I am hoping that I will be able to blow enough of the debris out that it will fix my laptop. In the back of my mind though, I realize that most likely this will not work.

At some point my daughter must have realized I was awake and came into the room I was in. I looked up at her and she had a funny look on her face. She then mumbled about “something” being on my face. All I could figure out, was that it was something black.

I looked in the mirror, from under my nose to the tip of my chin was black, and partially up my cheeks. Wiping it only smeared the black more. The dust and debris that I had blown from my laptop was now all over my face.

Quote from my daughter, “Mom, I thought you had fallen asleep while eating oreos and that was why you had all that black on your face.”

There were several possible titles I could have used for this post, but I liked the one about me being the boss the best. It sounds much better than, Duh! You should clean your computer.

Oh! My computer has not overheated all day!