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January 15, 2006
Good Computer Stuff for the New Year
On a regular schedule, once every three months, I go into the local WalMart and buy two cans of compressed air/gas/whatever the devil it is. Then, I take the various PC boxes here at The Swamp, and both printers, out into the garage, where I blow out all the dust devils that gather inside the cases. I blow off the CPU fan/heatsink combo, the hard disk, the CD and DVD drives, the floppy drives, the rat's nest of cables and wires, and the inside of the power supply.
Heat is the big enemy of electronic components, and dust is a great insulator. Plus, enough dust laying over the contacts of edge connectors will eventually cause a short, and POOF! No more computer.
This simple routine takes care of the physical side of PC maintenance. Total cost? Six bucks, plus a couple of hours of my time.
The software side is even less costly.
My firewall is built-in to my wireless switch. Wireless isn't used here at The Swamp just yet, but it will be within six months. Cost of the firewall? About twenty bucks added onto the cost of the wireless access point. Recurring costs? None.
Anti-virus software is provided, at no charge, by AVG AntiVirus, available from Grisoft HERE. AVG updates automatically, and has NEVER caused any kind of a problem, which is more than I can say for Norton or Macaffee.
Spyware protection is supplied by SpyBot Search & Destroy, at no charge, available HERE.
Every so often, I'll defragment the hard drives.
I've had exactly one hardware failure, a hard drive, while I've used this routine. One hardware failure in four years, with five different computers. (No, we don't have five different computers running at once - that'd be overkill, even for me!)
All of this stuff is easy to do, and well within the capabilities of any one who knows the difference between a screwdriver and a wrench.
What's much more difficult is data organization and backup strategies, which I'll get into some other time.
Posted by ward at January 15, 2006 08:35 PM