Dust is a numero uno pain - we just had a laptop here overheat and die due to dust. And I'm sure hundreds, possibly thousands more are dieing out here in Kabul. And vacuum cleaners, even our 2KW with an attachment, just was not powerful enough.
Solution Idea 1 - The weekly filtered blower. If we used that canned air stuff we'd be spending $hundreds a month on these cans. So we just picked up a car blower and put a filter of some kind over the intake (sponge, foam bed material or tissue paper) to blow the dust out.
Solution Idea 2 - The USB cooling pad with filters over the fans. This seems to work - so costs something like $15 per laptop.
Solution Idea 3 - Raising the laptop and putting a filter directly over the intake. This though resulted in CPU temperature raises. Bad news...
Anyhow - under Ubuntu Linux use the command
$acpi -t
To see the temperature. Different laptops are measuring thermals at different points, but from what I can read when it gets over 60 this is time to worry.
