Laptop Care and Feeding
Your laptop represents a sizeable investment in both money and time. As such you should take proper care of it. Here are just a few tips:
- Keep your laptop comfortable
- Extreme heat or cold are both bad for laptops. A good rule of thumb is if you would not be comfortable in an area, your laptop won't be either. If you are sweating or wearing a jacket, odds are your laptop is not happy. This means don't leave it in your car, no matter what the weather!!
- Use your laptop's battery
- Laptop batteries are like muscles. If you don't use them, they atrophy and die. Keeping your computer plugged in all the time is probably the worst thing you can do for it. At least once a week (and more often is not bad) unplug your laptop from the wall and run it on battery power until it informs you that you need to recharge. This will give the battery a needed workout and make it last longer. For even better battery life, only plug your laptop in to charge it. Once it is fully charged, unplug it and run it off the battery. While somewhat inconvenient, this will make your laptop battery last much MUCH longer.
- Defrag your hard drive
- With use your computer's hard drive becomes disorganized. At least once a month, and more often if you use your computer frequently, your hard drive should be defragged. This will clean up the disorganized files and allow the computer to work better.
- Keep your laptop clean
- Some people are afraid to clean their laptop keyboard, screen, etc, for fear of damaging them. Using a soft, lint free cloth, you can clean you screen, keyboard and even case. Simply spray some Windex (or any other non-streaking glass cleaner)on the cloth and gently rub the areas needing cleaning.
- Don't walk with your laptop on
- The hard drive in your laptop spins over 5000 times a minute. Walking around with it on is akin to carrying a playing phonograph. One stumble, stump, or jar and the record, or needle, could be ruined. The same is true for your laptop. If you are taking your laptop more than just a few feet, shut it down or at least put it to sleep before you move it.
- Don't eat or drink over your laptop
- Aside from the obvious hazard of spilling liquid into an electrical device (aka the Pepsi Syndrome) laptop keyboards are made to very tight tolerances. This means that even a very small amount of debris, such as crumbs, can keep the keys from depressing properly or can cause keys to stick. I won't even discuss what a batch of Krispy Kreme's can do to a laptop.
- Don't touch or tap your laptop screen
- Aside from making your screen harder to clean, touching a laptop screen is dangerous. The glass of your laptop's screen is only about 1/16th of an inch thick! That is half the thickness of the glass in a picture frame. Laptop manufacturers use a very high grade of glass, but even so it can be broken fairly easily. Tapping the screen with a ball point pen or pencil, along with being able to crack the glass, can also permanantly mark or scatch the surface.
- Don't close anything inside your laptop
- We have seen several laptop screens and keyboards destroyed because someone shut the lid with an ink-pen, or some other foreign object between the screen and keyboard. There is little or no clearance between the keyboard and the screen when the laptop is closed, even a couple of sheets of paper can put stress on the screen.
- Don't place anything heavy on top of your laptop
- While rare, we have seen computer screens broken or cracked by heavy objects (such as school books) being stacked on top of the laptop. If it's much heavier than a book, it probably should not be put on top of the laptop.
- Secure your laptop
- Laptops are getting smaller and smaller. This means they are getting easier and easier to steal. Make sure that if you are not using your laptop it is secured in some way. You can purchase cable locks for them fairly inexpensively, or you can make a habit of locking it in your drawer or file cabinet. Do not lock it in your car.