3. Top Ten Crimes against Your Computer, 5-10
5. Performing improper housecleaning. Life as a PC user would be so much easier if the process of adding or removing a piece of software was as simple as copying the application onto your hard drive. Alas, although the original DOS more or less worked like that, the arrival of the multitasking Windows environment and the concept of the interlinked office suite put an end to that.
Under Windows, components of an application are typically spread across many places in the computer, and additions or alterations are made to numerous components of the operating system, including the System Registry. However, you can cause damage to your operating environment by installing or uninstalling software without regard to the proper procedure. Follow all instructions at installation, including shutting down any other unnecessary Windows applications while new programs are put in place. If you choose to uninstall a program, use the facilities of the Add/Remove Programs option that is part of the Control Panel. Or, use the program’s own uninstaller, or a third-party program sweeper.
6. Not playing doctor with your drives. Even the largest hard drive will eventually become cluttered with fragmented files, wasted clusters, and errors, such as crosslinked files. The prudent user regularly employs ScanDisk (built into Microsoft Windows), or a third-party disk utility, such as Norton SystemWorks from Symantec or Diskeeper from Executive Software. There is nothing magical about the work that these programs perform — the creation of fragmented files and wasted clusters is an ordinary consequence of the way the file attribute table works. In an ordinary home or office, it is good practice to defragment your hard drive anytime more than 10 percent of the files are inefficiently scattered.
7. Failing to keep your system high and dry. Put most simply: Don’t drink and compute. And eating around the keyboard is not such a great idea, either. Speaking just for myself, I figure I drop a glass or spill a can of soda once every few months. It’s no big deal if that happens on the beach or in my kitchen. But if I spill a can into my PC or monitor, the consequences can be catastrophic. Later in this chapter, I present some common-sense solutions that might undo the damage. But the only way to be sure food and drink don’t damage any of your components is to simply keep them away from your system.
8. Not keeping your cool. Heat is one of the principal enemies of your computer and your monitor. Never block the inflow and outflow openings on your PC’s case. A well-designed case is part of the cooling system for your computer, and most systems don’t cool properly without the case in place.
Never operate a PC without its cooling fan properly operating. Monitors produce a great deal of heat that is normally vented through its top. Never place papers or other objects on top of the case. One of the dumbest office products I have ever seen is a set of plastic shelves intended to encase your monitor and allow you to place a telephone and books above it. This sort of device is almost guaranteed to cause the monitor to overheat and shorten its life; in the worst case, it could cause a fire.
9. Mispowering your system. Electricity is a flowing river, but like a waterway, it sometimes surges and wanes. A power surge or spike can fry your PC. A brownout can shut down your system or cause damage. Don’t connect your PC directly to the wall outlet. Every system should have a surge protector in place on the power line. Even better is an uninterruptible power supply that isolates the system from the power line; a UPS powers the PC from a large battery, all the while recharging the storage device.
10. Not keeping your system clean. Cigarettes, hair spray, pet hair, dirt, and dust are unfriendly neighbors for a PC. They can cause a hard drive to crash, make it difficult to read an optical CD-ROM, and block the air vents for cooling. Vacuum your office or work-space regularly, and consider using an air cleaner in especially dirty environments.
Not bad, but I'll take a few exceptions:
1 - cleaning up and defragmenting your hard disk is Windows specific.
The Microsoft block allocator is brain dead, was made that way, and will remain so for as long as Diskeeper and Norton Systemworks create revenue: a Mac OS X, xBSD or Linux-based system doesn't need defragmentation(*), as it is done by the OS on every disk access. You can get efficient defragmentation by:
- disabling System Restore: it doesn't work very well anyway, is a virus nest, and eats up to 6 Gb on your hard disk.
- setting your swap file to a fixed size.
- disabling file system indexing.
- deleting DrWatson's log.
- running Ccleaner once in a while with most settings enabled: once you have applied hotfixes, you don't need the uninstall files anyway. You'll need to clean up IE7's and WMP's patches yourself though.
- make Pagedefrag run at every boot after 0 second wait: the first time it may take a while to run, but it'll keep the Registry and swap file in one piece.
(*)to be fair, such a system may still fragment if you fill up a partition with huge files when it is already more than 80% full - Windows will fragment any file if you get past 10% partition capacity. Some say it's a way to prevent data corruption, as usually adjacent sectors are more likely to get corrupted, but then if that's the case Windows doesn't fragment ENOUGH.
2 - a resident antivirus is a resource drain.
Using a limited user account, a well configured firewall (in software or hardware, preferably both), and scanning downloaded files before you run them (and not making use of MS Outlook Express, which runs files for you) will keep you safe enough.
Not using IE may help, too: Opera or Firefox can operate as pure user level processes. Firefox 3 will be able to notify antivirus when a file is downloaded (if it interacts well with ClamAV, you can dump Norton and forget about the yearly AV tax).
3 - power surge protection.
A sound advice. However, a beefy PSU that you change every 1-2 years and a good power surge preventer are, in my experience, less costly and more efficient than a pack of batteries you'll need to renew every year. A good PSU in great shape can handle brown-outs, especially if your system doesn't draw too much current, and a surge protector will cover the PSU's most damaging attack. Changing the PSU regularly ensures that its capacitors remain at peak efficiency, and that its voltage regulators work as required. It is also unsound to clean up a PSU (it's dangerous!), so getting a new one is the most efficient way to get a clean one. With Vista, no UPS lasts long enough to allow you to save your files and shut down a system cleanly.
Clutz. I eat and drink around mine everyday and I've never once spilled so much as a drop of milk.
Milk eh?
I'd suggest keeping your files on a NAS drive or USB external drive and formatting your MS OS every year.
Besides running a limited account try Virtual Machines for avoiding those pesky viruses