Don’t Do This!

A friend of mine has just had his laptop whacked from his car. While this is a fairly common occurrence these days and may not sound at all strange, the odd thing here was that it was happening to him a second time! On the previous occasion, he’d carefully locked it inside the boot of his car just before trotting off to shop in a bustling market. This time it was lying on the rear seat as he got off for a couple of minutes to answer the call of nature on a fairly deserted stretch of road. Both mishaps happened in broad daylight. Needless to say, he lost not only the laptops but a lot of data each time.

Keeping stuff safe
What does this tell you? One: never ever leave you laptop, phone or other gadgets and valuables in the car in plain sight of everyone — even for a few minutes. If you have no other option and have to keep gadgets in the boot of the car, do it at the beginning of your journey — or stop en route and stow them away. Two: like we always emphasise, please back up your data regularly. So even if you lose your machine, you will be able to salvage the situation from the work point of view — to a certain degree at least.

Avoid the ‘do nothing’ mode
It is also generally a bad idea to move around your house or office — from room to room or up and down steps — with a laptop that is switched on and running. A running laptop means an active, spinning hard disk which can easily be damaged with a sudden jerk. And a damaged hard disk could mean loss of precious data. If you don’t want to power it down every time you are moving the machine, at least snap the lid closed and let it go into stand-by (default) or hibernate mode. You can also use the power option and configure Windows to shut it down completely every time you close the laptop’s lid. But avoid the “do nothing” mode.
Similarly, nothing could be worse than hitting or slapping your PC or laptop in anger. Frustrating wait states, agonisingly slow boot ups or shut downs, or a frozen system that’s doing nothing at all will not magically fix themselves if you thwack the device. In fact, you could compound the situation from an easily curable software glitch to a more serious hard disk one. Deal with the problem systematically.

Machines should stay cool
Enjoy working with your feet up on the couch, a soft cushion on your belly and your laptop perched atop it? Or, now that winter’s here, snuggled up in a fluffy quilt perhaps, eh? No harm in that. But ensure that the cooling vents of the laptop are not hindered by any soft materials. Blocking the air flow and ventilation impedes the cooling system which naturally causes a laptop to overheat. If you do intend to work a lot lying in bed or lounging on a couch, buying a laptop desk like the Logitech Lapdesk N700 makes a lot of sense.
The writer is a part-time publishing consultant and a full-time devotee of all things tech. Contact him at
ashishone@gmail.com

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