Volume 1 - Issue 4
Greetings Again To All,
It somehow feels like deja vu that I am re-writing this article, but due to technical things beyond my control I will try to duplicate it. I believe that this issue dealt with cleaning your computer and also the reason for the topic of this issue.To regress I was installing a U.P.S. (Un-interruptable power supply ) on our home network which consists of my wife's business computer , my business computer and our back-up computer. While doing this chore I decided to clean everything because our location in the city tends to create a lot of dust also our two cats tend to shed a lot so the dust bunnies run rampant behind the computer desks. I plugged in our new suck a bowling ball through a garden hose vacuum cleaner and proceeded to suck up all the dust and fur clogging the front and back of our computers, ( Catch it yet !!!).
All said and done I hooked up all the assorted wires and cables to the boxes and began one at a time powering them up. Turned on my wife's computer and was happy to see the boot up beginning , next came our back up box and Voila' it too began to boot .Then came my new computers turn and after hitting the power button was shocked to see nothing happening. So I thought I may have forgotten to plug it in so again checked to see if all power cords were plugged in and after dicovering that it had power my heart rate began to climb. The following panic episode would have been worthy of an Academy award as I found that my new P-4 , 1.7 gig rocket sled now was dead as a post. Upon later examination it was found that not only was the motherboard dead but also the hard drive was toast as well.To say the least I was depressed to find that it was possible that I was the cause of this calamity. Did you catch it yet?
ESD Electro- Static Discharge was the cause. How so you say ?
That new vacuum cleaner developed so much air velocity at the edge of the dust brush creating a static charge of so many thousands of volts that I probably could have shocked someone back to life.
So Kiddies, What don't we do with a vacuum cleaner ? ( Besides the obvious of course ). We don't use it to clean electronics. Unless you want to buy a low static vacuum built for cleaning electronic stuff !!! So how do we rid ourselves of those pesky dust bunnies. Buy a can of compressed air and anti static dusting cloths . They are designed to trap dust and then just throw them away when your done. Remember when cleaning any part of your computer turn it off so you don't accidently delete anything or cause conflicting commands in your operating system. If for some reason you need to clean the case use a couple of paper towels with a little dish soap on them , wet completely then squeeze till just damp and this will remove most things ( coffee , tea ,soft drinks, dirt and such ). To clean the keyboard the same process is safe, wet paper towels with a little dish soap, squeezed out till just damp. I have heard of people soaking their keyboards in the sink even putting them in the dish washer No ! No ! No ! Do not do this!!!!
In order to clean your monitor screen of those annoying finger or nose prints. In our case because the cats tend to watch and sometimes chase stuff on the screen use denatured alcohol as anything stronger can damage the finish on the screen. You can buy wet wipes for monitor screens at most electronic or computer stores.
Just to educate you on the cost of re-building my computer I chose to use a different motherboard ( a personal choice ) which added an extra cost of $165 to the total because I had to change cases to fit the new board, a new hard drive, new ram because I found that the ram used in the original build of my computer was not the fastest so I incured the cost to upgrade to DDR ram, a DMA( Direct Memory Access ) cable which was not put in the first time for the hard drive . Grand Total for my stupidity around $ 700.00. I was not impressed with myself and as I have stated many times in the past that taking up another vocation such as basket weaving might be a lot less stressful. But we learn from our mistakes or at least we're supposed to. Now I am of the opinion that if it's not broke don't fix it !!!
As I have said before I am only human and still learning so if I can save someone some trouble because I have been there and done it and try to pass this info on to you so the same mistakes aren't duplicated again I feel like I have helped out. As we all know knowledge is the building block for the future so get out there and learn all you can.
