Anybody come across this?

WOW that's bad! Here's my prescription: GET SOME DUST FILTERS AND SOME DUST OFF AIR CANS! LOL. I have a nice Thermaltake Tsunami Case with stock fan filters and no real dust problems. hehe.

Whoaaaa.......... 8O

LOL, I hear ya man. I just got done cleaning the dang thing. Whew! It was a mess. I had to open my garage door and air it out and sweep. It was horrible.

This machine has a bad CD drive in it. Whenever it turned on, the light on the drive would come on and just freeze up. When I pulled the power plug out of the back of the drive, there was all this dust just caked all around it. The drive was full of dirt. I threw another drive in and that fixed the problem. I'm sure the dust killed the drive.

How old is this machine to get like this? Is it on the floor or up higher?

Actually - this looks like the same case as my Evesham PC - I didn't know for 2 years that the front cover was removable, as it isn't exactly obvious and quite hard to remove. I always cleaned the back and the inside, but after 2 years of having a PC in a room with Laminate flooring my PC looked just like that. I clean it out once a year now, and it still looks that bad - it's just a combination of living in a big town (lots of dust) and having Laminate Flooring (the PC Intake Fan works like a little hoover...)

I used to work for NCR Corporation and one of the accounts for which they provide service is Lowes. For those of you who don't know what Lowes is, it is a large, warehouse type hardware store where you buy supplies for construction and home improvement, etc... They have these dumb terminals with no hard drive, they are lan boot, but they have intel chips and they are basically a computer inside.
Well one day one of these decided to fail to power on. I recieved the service call and when I took the case off I started laughing really hard because the entire case was packed full of dust. Much worse than the example above... I'm talking completely packed full. There was so much dust that I could stick my finger into the dust and touch the motherboard, and pull it out and it would leave a hole where I poked my finger in. It was the absolute worst I ever saw and I've seen a lot over the years.

Wow. This is why I dust my rig every month or two.  

Unfortunately dust tends to get sucked through the drive if the rest of the system is nicely sealed up. One way to prevent this is to have a slight positive pressure inside the case. The other is to take the side of the case off. The second option doesn't help keep the dust out, but it saves the drive  

This particular machine was on the floor in a carpeted room. I guess it's the living room of this house it came from.

Needless to say, after I got all the dust bunnies out of it, I started to sweep it all up into a nice, neat little pile. I got so disgusted, I just opened up my garage door and swept it outside. It looked like a dustbowl out there ...