So How Do You Prevent Dust?

Well, once again it’s after midnight and I’m just thinking “Ok, so I’ve gotten the prelims down, time to get to work.” I hate it when that happens, especially for the third or fourth night in a row. Anyway, I picked up a new DVD drive today (an Optorite DD1601, which does dual layer (8.5G) DVD writing, amongst other things) in the midst of a bunch of “doing stuff” so I got to open up my cases and swap some drives around. In this I got to see the amazing amount of dirt and dust that ended up in my cases after only three months. So much in fact, that the fan on one of my graphics cards has started to chirp loudly (oiling will be forthcoming) which is to say the least, annoying. A quick oiling with sewing machine oile fixed things up though.

So I did the annual de-dusting. Of course it’s hard when you are a crazy cat man and have four cats, but still, other people don’t seem to have the problems with dust that I have here, or at least I never hear about them. How do you keep your computers clean and clear of dust, without having to go in every month with a can of compressed air and a screwdriver? I have both boxes on the floor, which isn’t a great solution, but having them both on the desk sucks as far as losing desk space. I was thinking of hitting Ikea and looking for something like this or this, but I don’t know if that’ll do any good, or if it’s just a matter of “sweep and dust every week, dust inside computers every month”. Is there maybe some soft of air cleaner system that’ll suck cat hair out of the air and keep it out of the computers?