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Drawn by the heat inside the computer, several small animals may simply decide to live inside your PC. Out of the blue, ants, cockroaches and even mice may use your computer as their five-star hotel. What happened to the computer of our reader Rodrigo Viera Santos was really amazing: hornets made a hive inside his computer. He even took a picture of it and sent us.

Figure 1: Amazing, a hornet hive inside a PC.

Figure 2: Detail of the hive made on the video card.

After we published this tutorial, two other readers sent us some amazing pictures. In Figure 3, you can see ants living inside a video monitor base and on the other pictures, check what happened when a mouse tried to literally enter the internet. As you can see, the mouse set the computer of this guy on fire!

Figure 3: Ants living inside the video monitor base.

Figure 4: Good lord! Is this mouse trying to enter the internet?

Figure 5: As you can see, the mouse set the computer on fire.

Figure 6: Really amazing.

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This type of problem is more common than most people imagine. The thing is most people only discover that their PC are infested with some kind of animal when the computer becomes defective and the technician – or the user – opens it. In some cases, animals may burn internal parts of the computer – especially the power source. We have already heard several reports of computers that smelled like something was burning and when the technician opened them, the cause was some small animal inside the power source.

There is a very simple way to reduce the likelihood of having animals live inside your PC: all you have to do is to close the unused slots at the back of the case, which are located in front of the motherboard slots. Note that in the personal computer with hornet problem form the picture there are two open slots, which were probably where the hornets entered.

In other words, all you have to do is to close those slots with the appropriate metallic parts that come with the case. In case you no longer have those metallic covers, you may ask for them to any friend who assembles and services PCs. Technicians usually have tons of those metallic covers and they will certainty donate you some for a good cause.

The other holes at the back part of the case should be considered with caution. All cases have – where the power source is – a hole through which the hot air leaves the computer. Additionally, several cases have small holes for air circulation. Those holes should not be covered, else you will create another problem in your computer, namely overheating. Therefore, you should only cover the holes that should not be open, bearing in mind the holes for air circulation should remain open.

If you find any animals in your computer, you should hire a specialized pet control company, because if there are animals inside your computer, it is very likely that there are more animals in the place where the computer is (your house or office), posing risk to your health, besides the risk of having those animals make other electronic equipment their homes, which could cause significant material losses.