Cigarette smoke deposits a film on the fans (and everything else) and makes the dust stick like glue and even the best can-o-air can't blow this stuff off. Cigarette smoke gets into the plastic turning it yellow and stinky. Equipment should be operated in a smoke free environment when ever possible.

Your hard drive naturally stores information by scattering it around your hard drive. When you have deleted a lot of files or uninstalled programs it creates large gaps between files and programs on the disk. After a while this can slow your system down a bit when it trys to search for this information, because it has to look all over the disk for the pieces it needs. Defragmentation fixes this problem.

ANTIVIRUS

There seems to be a misconception among a lot of users that having an antivirus program installed, no matter how old it is, is enough to keep you from getting infected. They are better off than the ones that have no protection at all installed, but only a little better. You need to understand that there is no way that any company can write a program that will stop malicious code from attacking your system if they don’t know how the code works. Everything that they work on to protect us is from viruses that have occurred in the past. Whether the new viruses that come out are variations of old viruses or they find some new way to get into our systems, all of the antivirus programs rely on viruses that they have seen in the past. Keeping updated antivirus definitions is essential.

LIGHTNING AND STATIC ELECTRICITY DAMAGE

ESD or ElectricStatic Discharge - Is one of the only things you can do to your computer to damage or destroy it. Static electricity that cannot be felt by a human can damage computer chips when the computer or other electronic device is touched. An example of what ESD is if you were to rub your feet on the carpet and then touch something metal and it will gave you a shock. If you were to do this to a component inside your computer such as your sound card it could completely destroy it or make it partially unusable. Damage like this can also cause your computer to not work. Usually when you do this to your computer or other hardware device it is possible that the manufacturer will not support it any more.

Lightning is much more powerful and therefore causes more serious problems. A lightning strike on your phone line can enter your computer through the modem. From there it can travel to the motherboard and then to the processor, memory, and other components. Each stage of its progress, the damage becomes less obvious. Some computers after replacing the modem seem to work fine, but months later failures begin. A lightning strike or other surge on the power lines is usually absorbed first by the power supply. If the power supply has been damaged, you can be assured that there is other damage within the computer. Some electrical damage will find its way past the power supply without causing a failure in the power supply. This damage usually does not cause immediate failure, but months later components begin to fail. A lightning strike may not necessarily cause damage to other electrical devices in the same location; but if other devices have been damaged, then the computer probably has been damaged also. With a network, the ground potential from one system to another (even only a few feet away) can be hundreds or thousands of volts. This usually damages the network cards and hubs. Again, this damage may enter the computer system and cause other problems as described above.

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