Basic of Computers

Education
Basics of Computers
	What is Computer?
	What is Information?
	Where Computers are Used?
	Why Use a Computer?
	Anatomy of a Computer System
	How to avoid a Disk Crash?
	How to Prevent Viruses?
	How to avoid PC Meltdown?
	Keep Your PC safe from Kids
	Keep it Clean

Basics of Computers

How to avoid a Disk Crash

You turn on your Windows computer and get a message that it can't find a boot device. Your computer is telling you:

A. No more computer soccer for you.
B. Your hard drive is toast.

As this is an article about PC perils, you've probably guessed that the answer is B. (For a Mac user, the telltale sign is being greeted at start-up by a flashing question mark instead of a smiley face.) Of course, a hard disk crash is no laughing matter; you could lose months or years of work.

Although it is possible to recover from a hard disk crash -- or at least to recover your files -- the best way to deal with a crash is to prevent it. Your best preventive tool is a utility that scans your hard disk to detect and fix errors. Both Windows and the Mac come with disk scanning utilities (ScanDisk and Disk First Aid, respectively) that you can use to keep your hard disk error-free. You can also buy commercial disk utilities such as Norton Utilities and Hard Drive Mechanic, which not only scan your disk but also have powerful crash recovery features. Don't lose valuable data because you neglected your hard disk.

Speed Up Your Hard Disk

Defrag -- short for defragment -- is a process that finds the scattered chunks of files and orders them sequentially on your hard disk. Once that's done, the read mechanism barely has to move to load a file, so the load time decreases. The result is much faster system performance.

To defrag the hard disk of your Windows system, use the Disk Defragmenter utility found in the Programs/Accessories/System Tools folder. The Mac doesn't have a built-in defrag utility; you need a commercial one, such as the Speed Disk program that comes with Norton Utilities.

Select the disks you want to scan. ScanDisk can check all writable disks in your system, even removable media disks.

The Standard test checks the disk for file system errors. Run this test once a week or after any system crash.

The Thorough test checks the physical surface of your disk for hard errors -- spots on the hard disk that can no longer hold data. A Thorough test can take an hour or more, depending on your system's speed and your hard disk's size.

If you select this option, ScanDisk fixes any errors it finds based on the settings you select on the Advanced screen. Otherwise, the program stops whenever it finds an error.

The Advanced options let you indicate how ScanDisk should deal with errors. After a disk crash, select Make Copies under Cross-Linked Files and Convert to Files under Lost File Fragments. Examine the resulting files to see if they are files you need. For your weekly cleanup, select the Delete and Free options, respectively.

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