Housekeeping Hints: De-file Often, Save
Sydney Morning Herald
Wednesday October 23, 1996
There are some essential acts of kindness with which you should indulge your PC, says MARK CAMM . Otherwise, when you least expect it, it's going to wallop you right in the goolies.
THERE'S irony and a touch of paradox in all of this. The editorial and page make-up PCs at The Northern Herald are linked by a network to the series of mini computers at Fairfax headquarters that make up one of the biggest computer publishing systems anywhere. Except for some specialised internal hardware which makes the PCs think they're something they're not, and a custom keyboard, they are bog-standard off-the-shelf units, not even Pentium powered. They have been in place for a few years and not once, not ever, have any of the essential tips I'm about to pass onto you been done to them.
They're covered in dust often, one is even lying on its back under a desk. They never get turned off, except when the system crashes, and they never get looked after.
They're often, um, accidentally kicked and knocked, and in general treated with absolute disdain and thoughtlessness.
On the whole, these PCs have never complained. But with The Northern Herald's test PC, and all PCs I've had in my personal care, it is a cotton wool and softly-softly treatment all the way.
I wouldn't dream of doing to the test PC the things I don't do to the editorial ones.
So here you go, a guide to PC survival:
* EITHER leave your PC switched on or off. If during the day you're one of the wallies that's constantly turning your PC on, doing 10 minutes' work, and then switching it off, stop it immediately. Leave the blessed thing on; don't even bother switching it off overnight. Use a screen saver.
If you use your PC only occasionally, but when you do, you spend several hours at the keyboard, turn it off when you've finished. There's no need and no gain from you leaving it on.
Except for the cooling fan in the power supply unit, and the cooling fan over Pentium processors, there are no moving parts in a PC, nothing to mechanically wear out. But there is heat. Each time you switch your PC on, the processor instantly rockets to something like 70 degrees. Switching the unit on and off several times a day, every day, can put a lot of heat stress on the processor.
The only rider to all of this is thunderstorms. A PC left on during a storm, unless it is protected by specialised hardware, can get cooked. Spike killers and power surge plugs offer some protection, but they are simply not fast enough to cope with the massive energy surges caused by lightning strikes. The specialised units, which guarantee a constant power supply, cost from a few to several hundred dollars. If you have one of these and there's a thunderstorm, don't panic. Otherwise, switch your PC off and leave it off until the storm passes.
Switch it off at night, too, if you think there are likely to be storms while you're asleep.
* DEFRAGMENT, defragment, defragment, and Scandisk , Scandisk , Scandisk .
As you work, changing files, adding or removing programs, or just playing around, the PC uses the hard disk fairly inefficiently. It puts information into a series of allocation units on the drive, but if it can't put all the info into a series of allocation units next to one another, it will lazily look for free space elsewhere and plonk the info it couldn't fit there. The result is that you can have bits and pieces of a single program or large file all over your hard disk, and not next door, sequentially, to one another, as you would expect. This is called fragmenting, and left unchecked can seriously affect your PC's performance and integrity.
It's like leaving your socks in the garden shed, your undies out in the car (which you probably do occasionally, but not for the reasons I'm thinking of), your shirts up on the roof, shoes in the microwave, pants with the neighbours and ties on the next flight to Amsterdam.
Defragmenting your PC is simple.
If you use Windows 95 and you have never defragmented, this is how to do it: click Start, move the cursor up to Programs, over to Accessories, down to System Tools, click on Disk Defragmenter, and click start. Depending on how badly fragmented the disk is, the process can be reasonably quick or very, very slow. It works by putting all your program and related files that had been scattered around the disk together in the one place. Don't do it just occasionally, but at a minimum once a week, if not daily. Even if you get a reading that says the drive is 0 per cent fragmented, defragment.
The same goes for Scandisk, a program that checks the health of the hard disk. It looks for lost parts of files, errors in the file allocation table and the physical integrity of the disk itself. Scandisk is accessed in the same way as the defragmenter. Do the standard test often - this simply checks the file allocation table and system folders - and the thorough test - which does everything, including a surface scan - just as often. It might save you from a hard disk crash.
* REMOVE from the hard disk any files or programs you don't use.
Freeing up space increases speed. If the disk is full, and full of junk, the PC doesn't know that it's junk so searches through what's there anyway in pursuit of the file or program you've asked for. It's one of the paradoxes of having a hard disk with huge storage capacities. You might have 1.3Gb of space, but you'd be a fool to fill it all up. The more you have on the disk, the slower it will be, period. And every time you remove a program or files, defragment and Scandisk. Every time.
* KEEP it clean. For God's sake don't go spraying Mr Sheen into the machine, but regularly wipe over the box, and carefully clean the back, too, where all the plugs and do-dads spew out.
The power supply cooling fan sucks in a lot of air, and with it dust which can eventually finely coat the circuit boards and components inside the PC. The problem here is heat. The dust acts as an insulating layer, making it harder for heat to dissipate.
If you keep the surroundings dust free, you reduce the amount of dust getting inside.
By the way, cockroaches simply adore the warm, dry insides of a PC or monitor.
* IF you drop a cup of coffee over the keyboard, or a scotch and dry, or the baby vomits on it, all is not lost. Immediately unplug the keyboard and rinse it under a tap.
It's not the moisture you're worried about, but sticky substances that can freeze the keys when they dry or if they're allowed to set. A thorough rinsing leaves you only with a water problem, and left for a few days in a warm place to dry out, the keyboard should survive.
* GET the details of your system's BIOS and CMOS settings, and write them down. Some set-ups will allow you to print them out. The BIOS and CMOS contain the information your system needs to know what hardware is hanging off it, such as disk drives, monitor and keyboard. When you turn your PC on, the BIOS and CMOS information is loaded from read only memory into the system's random access memory, even before it's even begun to think about looking for an operating system to load and run. Without this information, the system is a dead duck.
Normally, you never have to worry about the BIOS or CMOS settings. They're almost always set by the retailer when you buy your system and rarely are there any circumstances where you need to alter them.
However, the read only memory in which this information is stored is kept there courtesy of a very small battery inside the PC. If the battery goes flat, and it will after a few years, and needs replacing, the BIOS and CMOS information needs to be set again. If you don't have this information, particularly information about the hard disk, its type and size and so on, you are in deep fertiliser.
You should have received with your system a small manual or booklet which will explain how to access and set up the BIOS and CMOS. If you have the correct information, it will be a piece of cake. If you don't, you have to make an expensive, time-consuming and inconvenient visit to a PC repairer to have the job done for you.
* NEVER, ever but never put a "friend's" floppy disk into your system without first scanning it for viruses. Don't have an anti-virus program? Get one. Never use disks whose source and safety you're not sure of. Then don't worry about viruses.
If you're an Internet user, for pity's sake use an anti-virus screener before downloading files. The bugs are there on the Internet and are spreading, even to operating systems such as Windows 95 for which viruses are supposedly not yet a threat. Rubbish. I copped one from the Internet just recently and it crashed my hard disk in spectacular fashion.
* IF under Windows 95 you get an error message saying an illegal operation has taken place and the program will be shut down, don't let it shudder your bowels. It's probably just that a simultaneous request was made to the same place in the processor or memory by a program. Just follow the instructions on the screen. Shut the program down if you have to, or keep going, save if you can what you were working on, then close down Windows 95 and do a restart.
* SAVE regularly, often and methodically. Save your work every few minutes. If the program, such as Word for Windows, allows for automatic saving, set the time at every few minutes. When the worst happens, and next-door's brat kicks the power plug out of the wall and your PC goes bye-byes, you will have only lost what wasn't saved in the past few minutes, instead of everything you had been working on all morning.
For every situation that arises there is usually a solution, and if you do have a problem, don't panic. The cause is likely to be simple, as will be the solution. The trick is to think first, act later. If you've been a good little Vegemite and realised prevention is better than cure, then chances are that when things do go wrong you'll be in a strong position to make them right again.
Unfortunately, if not, then I have to tell you PCs are not heavy enough to make good anchors and they don't respond well to flight and sudden impact with solid objects such as walls.
* The Northern Herald's pampered test Pentium 166 PC is supplied by Beam Computers and Peripherals, Unit 4D, 6 Boundary Road, Northmead 2152. Ph (02) 9890 1704, fax (02) 9890 1513.
© 1996 Sydney Morning Herald