Prevent problems

These tips will help keep your computer in good shape, so you’ll have fewer problems and need fewer repairs.

Hot weather

If possible, avoid using the computer in hot weather.

When the room’s temperature rises above 93 degrees, the fan inside the computer has trouble cooling the computer sufficiently. Wait until the weather is cooler (such as late at night), or buy an air conditioner, or buy a window fan to put on your desk and aim at the computer, or use the computer for just an hour at a time (so that the computer doesn’t have a chance to overheat).

Another problem in the summer is electrical brownouts, where air conditioners in your house or community consume so much electricity that not enough voltage gets to your computer.

Transporting your computer

Some parts inside the computer are delicate. Don’t bang or shake the computer! If you need to move the computer to a different location, be gentle!

Before moving the computer, make backups: copy everything important from the computer’s hard disk onto floppy disks. For example, copy all the documents, spreadsheets, and database files you created. Unless you’re using Windows Me or XP (which are solid), you should also copy AUTOEXEC.BAT, CONFIG.SYS, and COMMAND.COM.

Transporting by hand If you must move the computer to a different desk or building, be very gentle when you pick up the computer, carry it, and plop it down. Be especially gentle when walking on stairs and through doorways.

Transporting by car If you’re transporting your computer by car, put the computer in the front seat, put a blanket underneath the computer, and drive slowly (especially around curves and over bumps).

Do not put the computer in the trunk, since the trunk has the least protection against bumps. If you have the original padded box that the computer came in, put the computer in it, since the box’s padding is professionally designed to protect against bumps.

Transporting by air If you’re transporting your computer by air, avoid checking the computer through the baggage department.

The baggage handlers will treat the computer as if it were a football, and their “forward pass” will make you pissed.

Instead, try to carry the computer with you on the plane, if the computer’s small enough to fit under your seat or in the overhead bin. If the whole computer won’t fit, carry as much of the computer as will fit (the keyboard, monitor, or system unit?) and check the rest as baggage. If you must check the computer as baggage, use the original padded box that the computer came in, or else find a giant box and put a lot of padding material in it.

When going through airport security, it’s okay to let the security guards X-ray your computer and disks. Do not carry the computer and floppy disks in your hands as you go through the metal detector, since the magnetic field might erase your disks.

For best results, just tell the guards you have a computer and disks, Instead of running the computer and disks through detection equipment, the guards will inspect your stuff personally.

To make sure your computer doesn’t contain a bomb, the guards might ask you to unscrew the computer or prove that it actually works. If your computer’s a laptop and you need to prove it works, make sure you brought your batteries — and make sure the batteries are fully charged!

Since airport rules about baggage and security continually change, ask your airport for details before taking a trip.

Beware of theft. Crooks have used this trick:

A crook waits for you to put your laptop on the X-ray conveyor belt. Then the crook cuts in front of you and purposely gives himself trouble going through the metal detector (by having keys in his pocket). While he delays you and distracts security guards, his partner grabs your laptop off the conveyor belt and walks away with it.

Transporting by mail Computer companies have discovered that FedEx handles computers more carefully — and causes less damage — than the post office and UPS.

Parking the head If your computer is ancient (an 8088 or an early-vintage 286), it might have come with a program called SHIPDISK or PARK.

That program is not part of DOS; instead, the program comes on a floppy disk called “Utilities” or “Diagnostics”.

That program does an activity called parking the head: it moves the hard drive’s head to the disk’s innermost track, where there’s no data. Then if the head accidentally bangs against the disk, it won’t scrape off any data.

If your computer came with a SHIPDISK or PARK program, run it before you transport the computer. After your journey, when you turn the computer back on, the head automatically unparks itself and reads whatever data you wish.

If your computer did not come with a SHIPDISK or PARK program, don’t worry about it.

Modern disk drives park the head automatically whenever you turn the power off. For older disk drives, handling the computer gently is more important than parking the head. In any case, do not borrow a SHIPDISK or PARK program from a friend, since somebody else’s program might assume the hard drive has a different number of tracks.

Repair shops use an extra-fancy PARK program: it tests the hard drive, determines how many tracks are on it, and then moves the head to the correct innermost track.

Save your work

When you’re typing lots of info into a word-processing program or spreadsheet, the stuff you’ve typed is in the computer’s RAM. Every ten minutes, copy that info onto the hard disk, by giving the Save command. (To learn how to give the Save command, read my word-processing and spreadsheet chapters.)

That way, if the computer breaks down (or you make a boo-boo), the hard disk will contain a copy of most of your work, and you’ll need to retype at most ten minutes worth.

Don’t trust automatic backups If your word-processor is modern, it has a feature called “automatic timed backup”, which makes the computer automatically save your document every 10 minutes. Don’t trust that automatic feature! It might be saving your latest error instead of what you want.

For example, if you accidentally wreck part of your document and then automatic timed backup kicks in, you’ve just replaced your good, saved document by a wrecked one, and the good one is gone forever. Give the Save command manually, so that you, not the computer, will decide when and what to save.

Split into chapters If you’re using a word-processing program to type a book, split the book into chapters. Make each chapter be a separate file. That way, if something goes wrong with the file, you’ve lost just one chapter instead of the whole book.