Ways to help you make the life of your computer last longer

Here's something I wish I would of known when I got my first computer. Which was oh somewhere around 10 years ago maybe more, but it was one of those really quiet hp computers. It had a great system, a decent size hard drive, 2.0 Ghz AMD processor, and its CPU cooler was really quiet, as if the fan was not spinning at all. It lasted a couple of years, and just one morning I pressed the button like usual, it went through the normal bios post screen, but I never saw the windows post screen with the scrolling blue bar thing (it was running xp). And at the time I didn't know much about computers and did not know what was happening, so I gave it to a friend, and after about a week he told me that the processor was fried. After he fixed it (built a new computer), he told me that I should check the inside of the computer and see if it needs to be cleaned. Checking it about once every two months or if I use it more often, then check it at least once a month, because the heat sinks on the CPU cooler collects dust and if you let it build up the processor starts to run hotter than usual and in my case it overheated and smoked the processor. so the picture above is a dusty CPU cooler, the one I had was worse than this one. And its soo easy to clean it, you don't even have to take out you cooler. The proper way to clean it is to take it out blow it off with those canned air dusters and with short bursts of air and just keep blowing the compressed air at it till you think its clean. But the alternative way (easier way) to do it is, first open your case, find the CPU cooler, before using your compressed air you might want to take the computer to an area where you don't mind getting dust everywhere, then just start doing short bursts of air at the fans, the cooler in the case, and if you can get at your video card (if it has a fan, or just a heat sink) and just do short bursts of air at the heat sinks and fans. And just doing this to your systems can help it last a bit longer, and hopefully avoid frying your processor.