If you ever open up your computers, you’ll know that inside, along with the chips and fans and other electronics that are supposed to be there, you’ll find something rather less welcome. We’re talking about dirt, the filthy cruft that somehow migrates from the atmosphere into the deep recesses of the average computer.

I have serviced many, and it is always the laptops that disgust me the most. Unlike a desktop machine, whose interior fills up with not much more than dust and leaving the real grot for the keyboard, a notebook goes everywhere, from bar to kitchen table to late-night “movie watching” sessions in bed, and it’s interior detritus reflects this.

The Register has collected together six pages filled with the gummed-up, skanky innards of neglected machines. The most disgusting is the food-crusted keyboard above, but there is one rather cute picture of a Dell desktop that has become a home to spiders, and one (literally) shocking image of two mice which tried to hook up inside a power supply.

Until I saw this gallery, I had thought that a friend’s 12-inch PowerBook was the most neglected machine I had peeked inside, filled as it was with crumbs, hair, a gray cotton-candy of dust and even a a sprinkling of coins. Now it seems almost clean, but I am getting increasingly worried about the source of the squeaking coming from the Lady’s MacBook.

Dirty, dirty PCs: The X-rated picture guide [The Register]