How to protect your computer and your data

Consider for a moment a scenario in which you shuffle across a carpeted room, reach for a door knob and feel a sudden sharp pain accompanied by an audible “zap”. You have just experienced a static electricity discharge of at least 1,000 volts jumping as much as half an inch and traveling through your finger tip, through the rest of your body and through your feet on its’ way to ground. Fingers weren’t designed for that kind of abuse.

Next, consider a lightning bolt. This show is related to the door knob zap but on a huge scale. The average lightning bold is driven by 300 million volts (a three with eight zeros). It heats the air through which it passes to 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit (28,000 degrees Celsius for metric system fans). That’s five times the temperature of the surface of the sun. The heated air expands so fast that it creates a shock wave that travels faster than the speed of sound. We call that supersonic wave breaking the sound barrier “thunder”. Unlike the door knob zap which may jump half an inch, the lightning bold that strikes the ground or a tree or your car has traveled anywhere from 30,000 to 60,000 feet (six to twelve miles).

Why this matters.

“Ok,” I hear you ask, “what does any of this have to do with protecting my computer”?

The various components inside a computer want a steady supply of 3.3, 5 and 12 volts plus or minus 1%. 12 volts is used to run motors in conventional hard drives, fans and DVD drives. 5 volts is needed by most of the electronic components. The exceptions are the CPU, or Central Processing Unit and RAM. The CPU is the “brain on a chip” that controls the computer and does most of the calculating jobs. RAM, or simply “memory” is the workspace of the computer where information is manipulated by the CPU.

Over time, processors have gotten faster and so has RAM because RAM has to keep up with how fast the CPU is sending and retrieving data. With increased speed in both the CPU and RAM comes increased heat and you may remember from last time, heat is a computer’s enemy. Keeping things cool is a major consideration in designing computers. The modern CPU is a chip about 1 ½  to 2 inches square and is made up of an astonishing 6 to 19 billion transistors. If not cooled by fans, fins or both, it would quickly become too hot to touch and would soon thereafter, quite literally,melt. One of the heat-reducing techniques that chip manufacturers have adopted is to get CPUs and RAM to run on lower voltages. That’s why 3.3 volt output was added to the power supplies but it doesn’t stop there. There are now CPUs that run on 1.3 volts.

Doorknob zaps and lightning

Even the power of a AAA battery is too much for a modern CPU or high-speed RAM. The electronic components must have absolutely steady, unwavering power at 12, 5 and 3.3 volts (circuits on the motherboard take care of 1.3 volts).  Fortunately, computer power supplies, whether they are inside the computer or external adapters, are up to the task. Unfortunately, external sources of electricity put our computers (and other electronic devices) at great risk. The two biggest threats: static discharge and lightning.

Door knob zaps are much less of a problem now than they were when I started my career in IT. This is mainly because most carpeting today is formulated to resist static buildup. However, if you get these annoying zaps today, there is help available. By far the most common point of entry for static discharge is the keyboard.An anti-static mat goes underneath your keyboard.An anti-static stripsticks to your keyboard just under the space bar. Either one of these accessories will have a wire which you can attached to the screw that holds an outlet cover plate in place. By touching the mat or the strip. any static charge you’ve built up will be sent harmlessly to ground.

Lightning is a bigger challlenge.  A bolt striking a nearby utility pole can send significant voltage past the power company’s safeguards. To keep those power fluctuations away from your computer, you need a surge protector.Most computer users need more than two outlets for their equipment and so they buy either power strips consisting of a box with multiple outlets and a power cord or they get a unit that plugs into the duplex outlet and provides six outlets. Surge protectors look pretty much the same but come with circuitry that detects sudden peaks in voltage and diverts them to ground. This recognition and redirectiontakes place within a few nanoseconds (billionths of a second) and saves expensive hardware. Not only do all of my computers have surge protection but so does my stereo system and my entertainment center.

A step up from a surge protector is an Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS). These are battery backup systems that will provide power to anything plugged into it when main power goes offline. They also provide surge protection.I don’t use a UPS so that I can work with the lights out but rather to give me time to log out and gracefully shut my computers down. Windows, especially, doesn’t like to suddenly lose power. It tends to be cranky on the next startup.

A few more things to keep your computer safe

1. It is best to not eat or drink while working at your computer. Crumbs can get under keycaps and make typing difficult. Sugary soft drinks all but destroy keyboards. It is very difficult to get all of the sticky stuff out. If you have a separate keyboard, replacing it is the best solution. If you spill on a laptop keyboard, please, call me. Do not put your keyboard in the dishwasher!
2. If you choose to eat or drink at your computer, get some canned air so that you can blow crumbs out of the spaces between the keys.
3. If your keyboard gets dirty over time, you can use a mild cleaner like Windex to clean the keycaps. Spray it onto a cloth and not directly onto the keyboard. Turn the computer off or, as I usually do, open a word processor so that the key presses don’t do anything unexpected.
4. Same advise for screens. Spray the cloth, not the screen.
5. In a thunderstorm, if the lights flicker  off and on as the power grid tries to get back online, turn off all of your electronic gear. The sudden surge of power when the lights come back on is likely to be higher or lower than 120 volts. Neither is good for electronics. Wait for things to stabilize before turning things back on.

Splitting today’s topic.

This was supposed to be about “How to protect your computer and your data”, but the first part took longer than I thought and the “data protection” part will be at least as long so I’ll pick up part two next time.

Until then, peace and blessings

Harry