To reduce your need for computer repairs, remember the following tips.
Hot weather
If possible, avoid using the computer in hot weather.
When the room's temperature rises above 93 degrees, the fan inside the computer has trouble cooling the computer sufficiently. Wait until the weather is cooler (such as late at night), or buy an air conditioner, or buy a window fan to put on your desk and aim at the computer, or use the computer for just an hour at a time (so that the computer doesn't have a chance to overheat).
Another problem in the summer is electrical brownouts, where air conditioners in your house or community consume so much electricity that not enough voltage gets to your computer.
Transporting your computer
Some parts inside the computer are delicate. Don't bang or shake the computer!
If you need to move the computer to a different location, be gentle! And before moving the computer, make backups: copy everything important from the computer's hard disk onto floppy disks. For example, copy all the documents, database files, and spreadsheets you created, and also copy AUTOEXEC.BAT, CONFIG.SYS, and COMMAND.COM.
Transporting by hand If you must move the computer to a different desk or building, be very gentle when you pick up the computer, carry it, and plop it down. Be especially gentle when walking on stairs and through doorways.
Transporting by car If you're transporting your computer by car, put the computer in the front seat, put a blanket underneath the computer, and drive slowly (especially around curves and over bumps). Do not put the computer in the trunk, since the trunk has the least protection against bumps. If you have the original padded box that the computer came in, put the computer in it, since the box's padding is professionally designed to protect against bumps.
Transporting by air If you're transporting your computer by air, avoid checking the computer through the baggage department. The baggage handlers will treat the computer as if it were a football, and their ``forward pass'' will make you pissed.
Instead, try to carry the computer with you on the plane, if the computer's small enough to fit under your seat or in the overhead bin. If the whole computer won't fit, carry as much of the computer as will fit (the keyboard, the monitor, or the system unit?) and check the rest as baggage. If you must check the computer as baggage, use the original padded box that the computer came in, or else find a giant box and put lots and lots and lots of padding material in it. When going through airport security, it's okay to let the security guards X-ray your computer and disks. Do not carry the computer and disks in your hands as you go through the metal detector, since the magnetic field might erase your disks. For best results, just tell the guards you have a computer and disks; instead of running the computer and disks through detection equipment, the guards will inspect your stuff personally. To make sure your computer doesn't contain a bomb, the guards might ask you to unscrew the computer or prove that it actually works. If your computer's a laptop and you need to prove it works, make sure you brought your batteries ___ and make sure the batteries are fully charged!
Since airport rules about baggage and security continually change, ask your airport for details before taking a trip.
Parking the head If your computer is ancient (an 8088 or an early-vintage 286), it might have come with a program called SHIPDISK or PARK. That program is not part of DOS; instead, the program comes on a floppy disk called UTILITIES or DIAGNOSTICS.
That program does an activity called parking the head: it moves the hard drive's head to the disk's innermost track, where there's no data. Then if the head accidentally bangs against the disk, it won't scrape off any data.
If your computer came with a SHIPDISK or PARK program, run it before you transport the computer. After your journey, when you turn the computer back on, the head automatically unparks itself and reads whatever data you wish.
If your computer did not come with a SHIPDISK or PARK program, don't worry about it. Modern disk drives park the head automatically whenever you turn the power off. For older disk drives, handling the computer gently is more important than parking the head. In any case, do not borrow a SHIPDISK or PARK program from a friend, since somebody else's program might assume the hard drive has a different number of tracks.
Repair shops use an extra-fancy PARK program: it tests the hard drive, determines how many tracks are on it, and then moves the head to the correct innermost track.
Saving your work
When you're typing lots of info into a word-processing program or spreadsheet, the stuff you've typed is in the computer's RAM. Every ten minutes, copy that info onto the hard disk, by giving the SAVE command. (To learn how to give the SAVE command, read my word-processing and spreadsheet chapters.)
That way, if the computer breaks down (or you make a boo-boo), the hard disk will contain a copy of most of your work, and you'll need to retype at most ten minutes worth.
Split into chapters If you're using a word-processing program to type a book, split the book into chapters. Make each chapter be a separate file. That way, if something goes wrong with the file, you've lost just one chapter instead of the whole book. Disk space
Make sure your hard disk isn't full. Make sure your hard disk has at least 2 megabytes of unused space on it.
To find out how much unused space is on your hard disk, say:
C:\>dir
That makes the computer list the files in your root directory and also tell you how many bytes are free.
If the number of free bytes is less than 2,000,000, you have less than two megabytes of free space, and you're in a dangerous situation! Erase some files, so that the number of free bytes becomes more than 2,000,000.
If the number of free bytes is less than 2,000,000, some of your programs might act unreliably, because the programmers who wrote those programs were too lazy to check whether the programs would work on a hard disk that's so full. Some of those programs try to create temporary files on your hard disk; but if your hard disk is nearly full, the temporary files won't fit, and so the computer will gripe at you, act nuts, and seem broken.
If possible, erase enough unimportant files from your hard disk so that 5 megabytes are free. That ensures even the biggest temporary files will fit. It also helps DOS act faster, since DOS doesn't have to look so hard to find where your hard disk's free megabytes are.
Windows For Windows to run reasonably fast, at least 10 megabytes should be free, since Windows tries to create lots of temporary files.
Overly fancy software
Avoid buying and using software that adds many lines to your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files. The longer and more complicated your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files are, the greater the chance that something will go wrong with them, and your computer will refuse to boot up. Even if each line in your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT file looks fine, the lines may conflict with each other.
Keep your AUTOEXEC.BAT file simple, so that when you turn the computer on, the computer says:
C:\>
Do not make the computer automatically go into Windows or the DOS shell or a menu. Instead, get in the habit of manually typing ``win'' to go into Windows, ``dosshell'' to go into the DOS shell, a command such as ``menu'' to go into a menu, or a command such as ``do wp'' to go into Word Perfect (by using the DO.BAT trick I explained on page 130).
If you make the mistake of setting up your computer to automatically go into Windows, and Windows someday stops working properly, the computer won't boot at all. You'll be in a real mess!
Also, if the computer automatically goes into Windows, and you t
