Wait, are we supposed to be psychic now, or just really good at guessing what's hiding under a layer of dust? Honestly, I've been burned too many times taking people's word that their machine is "just old" only to find a tumbleweed of cat hair blocking the fan. My rule of thumb now is if they say it's slow, I pop the side panel first and say a little prayer. I once had a laptop that sounded like a jet engine, turns out it was just a decade of compressed Cheeto dust doing the cha-cha on the heatsink. My own tower taught me that lesson, I ignored it for months until it shut off mid-game, and I felt like a real genius when I saw the furball. So yeah, I open everything, mostly because I can't trust my own judgment anymore, let alone theirs.