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We expend bunches of keystrokes detailing how to recover from disaster, everything from sweeping spyware from your system to how to get your data back from the digital graveyard, but equally important is how to avoid potentially catastrophic scenarios in the first place. As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, or in in the world of PCs, hours of frustration.
On the flip side, maybe you have a masochistic desire to destroy your system. What better way to force your hand at upgrading then to render your current rig all but unusable? We don't condone killing hundreds, perhaps thousands of dollars of hardware, but hey, it's your stuff at stake, and how you choose to use (or abuse) it is up to you.
Either way, follow along as we show you the 10 worst things you can do to your PC and how to avoid them.
We all know what really goes on with BitTorrent and we're not about to pretend the only reason it's popular is because of capacious game demos and open-source Linux distros. BitTorrent picks up where Napster left off (before it went legit as a subscription-based music streaming service), serving up everything from legal content to copyrighted movies, music, and software. There, we said it -- behind all the winks and posturing, BitTorrent, if we're being totally honest, is a bastion of illicit downloading.
Don't worry, we're not going to step on our soapbox and shout about the evils of stealing software, but if we can't convince you from a moral perspective to use BitTorrent only for snagging legal content, consider going kosher to keep your rig from becoming riddled with foul files.
Here's the deal. Virus writers know exactly how popular BitTorrent has become, and combined with the allure of getting something for nothing, the temptation to fire up a free app clouds good judgment, making it all to easy to spread malware among the masses; This is what happened to users who went in search of pirated copies of Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty. Moral objections aside, you're playing a digital version of Russian Roulette whenever you download illegal torrents, and even legitimate torrents can come laced with dirty files.
We're not advocating that you should give up BitTorrent, but use the protocol wisely. Download your torrent links from trusted sources, and if you can't afford a piece of software, find a free or lower cost alternative before pirating a potentially booby-trapped package.
For more BitTorrent tips, see our 20 Essential Tricks and Skills Every BitTorrent User Should Know feature.
Show of hands, how many of you have ever spilled a drink at your computer desk? For those of you who have, consider yourself lucky if the only thing that was ruined was your keyboard. And for everyone else, your time is coming. Knowing this, we still keep our caffeinated beverages close by, mainly because nobody has come out with a caffeine patch to get us going in the morning.
Unfortunately, water and electronics don't mix, and neither does coffee, soda, beer, or any other liquids. The solution? Be careful. Other than that, it just boils down to common sense. You know, like don't rest your can of Amp on your desktop tower or on the edge of your desk directly above it and, if applicable, put the cap back on in between sips.
If you do spill, not all is necessarily lost. Depending on where you spilled your drink, you'll want to unplug your PC as quick as you can, forgetting about a proper shutdown procedure. Disconnect the power supply from your motherboard and then assess the damage. Is there liquid all over the place? Carefully pat it dry. If you spilled something sticky, you can use a damp cloth to help remove the residue, and then pat your components dry again. Filtered water works best for this part, as it won't leave mineral deposits behind, and you can also use isopropyl rubbing alcohol for spot cleaning. When you're finished, keep the side panel off and let your rig air dry for a day or two. When it's completely dry, you can try turning it back on. If nothing fizzles and pops, you're back in business. Otherwise, sorry dude, your system is toast.
The risk to reward ratio that comes from water cooling is dependent on how careful you are and how much research you put into your setup. Pre-assembled kits, for example, are about as safe as water cooling gets, though a sloppy install can still result in fried hardware.
Where the real fun begins is when you piece together your own water cooling loop. The more elaborate your loop, the more chances there are for something to go awry, and we're not just talking about wet hardware. Something as simple as removing a heatsink from your videocard can go terribly wrong if you rush things.
Once you have everything installed and ready to go, you'll want to test run your water cooling loop to look for any leaks. If you're fairly certain you did a good job securing the hoses, you can shortcut the testing process by strategically placing paper towels in and around your hardware and punching the power button. But if you want to play it extra cautious, a better idea is to turn on just the water pump and leave your PC out of the mix. You can do this by shorting the PSU's main 20/24-pin ATX connector -- all you need is a paperclip, which you'll bend and plug one end into the green wire and the other into any of the black wires, and then flip the switch on the back.
For more water cooling tips, see our "Build a Kick-Ass Liquid Cooling System -- 6 Simple Steps" feature.
Those air vents might give your system an aggressive look, but they're not just for show. This is where cool air gets sucked into your rig and presumably blown over your components before being expelled from the back. A clogged vent will prevent your air cooling scheme from working its mojo, and that's bad for your hardware.
Some enclosures ship with air filters while others go commando. Either way, it's critical that you keep dust and grime from building up and clogging these vents/filters. If you do have filters, remove them once a week or every other week and give them a shakedown. If they're really dirty, run a bit of filtered water through them to break up the gunk and then air dry.
A can of compressed air also goes a long way. A series of short blasts will send dust packing. It doesn't get rid of the dust completely, but it does prevent the dirt from building up into clumps and clogging those vents.
We also recommend a deeper cleaning about once a month (give or take, depending on how dusty your environment). Shut down your system, unplug the power supply, and rip the side panel off. Keeping your can of compressed air upright (if you tilt it, liquid will come spraying out), give a few quick blasts to your CPU heatsink, videocard, and anywhere else you see dust accumulating.
Monalisa. ILovexxx (where "xxx" is the name of your significant other). 12345. QWERTY. Password. Can you guess what all these have in common? That's right Matlock, these are all terrible passwords that are easily guessed. Using one of these is like locking your car door but leaving the window wide open.
Follow these tips to avoid inviting virtual ruffians into your digital world:
Comments are closed on this article
Philips
November 09, 2011 at 9:55pm
This is so cool. Thank you for the information. Recovery of the device is a much valuable topic.
1redone
October 20, 2011 at 2:50pm
Good article. Some people say magnets can damage computers too. I know one person who said that happened to them.
Philips
September 24, 2011 at 11:49pm
This is a reminder. Thanks for the post. All of these shall be watched out and readers must now be aware.
Philips
September 24, 2011 at 11:49pm
This is a reminder. Thanks for the post. All of these shall be watched out and readers must now be aware.
486DieHard
October 05, 2010 at 9:28pm
My first PC Build was a Pentium1 75Mhz
TX Pro motherboard... supported Intel, AMD and Cyrix(IBM sold out to VIA) upto 300MHz!
32Meg of Ram(2x16Meg 72Pin... 168pin was available)
500Meg HD
20x CD-ROM SANYO(Theese guys make parts for sony)
2Meg Video Cirrus Logic PCI (M/B had support for AGP)
ESS 16bit Soundcard
33.6k Modem
15" TTX SVGA CRT Monitor
- The times that I had with this rig... especially the BBS Parties!... Before Internet took over.
I_pwn_newbz86
October 05, 2010 at 12:40pm
I built my first computer when I was 12.
Antec 300
Intel Pentium DC E5200
2GB DDR2 800 CAS4
Gigabyte GA-EP43-DS3L
MSI 9800GT 512MB
250GB Seagate Barracuda
Assembled it in a few hours without a problem. Best day of my life.
billcipp
October 05, 2010 at 10:15am
We all know that a geek looks good wearing a wrist strap, but they do play a role far more than a fashion statment. They are critical when poking around the insudes of a computer. I was showing my son where his grapic card was and as I pointed to it a 1/4" spark left my finger tip and hit the board. When we tried to power up his computer, the familiar coded beeps had told me I fried it. He got a new GPU out of the deal and I was out $50.00
almhuss1
October 03, 2010 at 7:29pm
Remove side panel after shutting down. Take the hose from your vacuum cleaner (you do have one, don't you?) and vacuum out the debris, gently. It works much better than compressed air, because it takes the dirt away, rather than moving it around, and most vacuums don't move air with the force of a new can of air. Be sure to vacuum all of your chassis fans, and your CPU and Northbridge cooler fins as well.
itgurudude
October 06, 2010 at 1:10pm
I fix alot of coworker and freinds PC. All of them have hairballs inside that would choke several large cats. I used to be very meticulous about cleaning the inside with compressed air and then cleaning each of the fan blades with cotton swabs and cleaners. Then I tried it on my own system first and man did it work!
What I do now is remove the case door, go outside and place the computer on the ground by the garage. I then go and get my toro electric leaf blower out of the garage and stand back about 10-15 feet and hit the computer with the shot of air from the blower. Dust blows out of every orifice on the case and although air may be coming out at 100 mph on the blower, by the time it hits the case, it is quite benign to the components inside (don't want to be too strong to bend anything like a capcitor). A few seconds of this and the entire inside of the case, drives and bays are all clean. Sometimes, if I see the power supply is full of crud, I will remove the power supply from the case and blow them out the same way (only I can get closer) you should see the dust in those things alone. It really cleans up the heatsinks!
Skrýmir
October 04, 2010 at 11:32pm
The reason why compressed air is used is because it's not like to generate static. It might take longer but i usually take my videocard and all my fans out when i blow out my case to make sure they're all clean again.
Caboose
October 03, 2010 at 9:02pm
a Vacuum... Really? 'cause you know the static build up at the nozzel is nothing to be worried about.
There's a reason why compressed air is strongly recommended.
dentaku
September 30, 2010 at 5:46pm
After installing Win7 I did NOT install Quicktime and I've never installed iTunes on my own computer ever. It's horrifying how much stuff that software messes with and how many useless services it runs in the background.
I've also seen older machines become completely unusable because of Bonjour.
dracx619
October 01, 2010 at 6:57am
working with media, i am pretty much forced to install quicktime pro so i can work with these mac heads and fcp. i hate it...and it sucks that quicktime alternatives dont work
Keith E. Whisman
September 30, 2010 at 1:02pm
A friend of mine had a Dell with the BTX MB and cooling system. His computer would run slowly for a few minutes and then reboot every couple of minutes. I took his computer apart and there was about 5" inches of hair and dirt just completely clocking up the front panel, the air intake, CPU fins were clogged and the fan was jammed.
I was able to clean it all up in about an hour or so. The fan was high quality and seemed to work great after it had been cleared of all the dirt and hair.
The PC in this article looks almost pristine compared to my friends computer.
Eoraptor
September 30, 2010 at 4:38pm
Yup, when I was in highschool, Iwas tasked by a neightbor to put a larger hard-drive into a windows 95 era compaq. on opening up the PC, which had not been moved since first put in three years earlier, I physically had to scoop hand-fulls of dust out of the box *eww* especially if youre a microscopy nerd and know what dust is made of. Imagine their surprise that the old hard drive had failed u to *drumroll* heat soak of the controller.
Morpheous416
September 30, 2010 at 11:26am
As seen in the picture under the section "Ignoring AV Software" here in this article,.. I can't tell you how many times I have remoted into a customer's computer and seen so many toolbars installed that IE was almost non-existant.
And they wondered why their net connection was almost dead.
When installing software, free or otherwise... WATCH the install screens!!! More often than not, they are loaded with additional options to install 3rd party software. Toolbars are among the most common, and they add up quickly. Some are innocent and just stand there in IE waiting to be used, while others actively re-route your connection to the net to other servers to watch your activities. This not only slows your connection down to the site you are trying to get too, but it can leave you open to email spam as well. Spam leads to links, clicking links leads to disaster as your email quickly spreads across the world.
Also be aware, that an option to install a toolbar or other 3rd party app, may not have a choice on the install screens, but is an agreed to requirement in the EULA.
Going click click click click on the happy little Next button can also lead to problems that you probably won't remember how or when it happened. That's when you call in to tech support and go, "it was working fine last week, I don't know what happened. I didn't do anything".... uh, yeah... ya did.
To quote Scotty from Star Trek 6, The Undiscovered Country, " A computer doesn't lie "
=)
I do not have any AV software such as Avast, or Norton.. and will never use it. I use MSE and Malwarebytes because they work, and I don't get any of the half a billion issues that you do run across when legitimately using AV software. Yes.. the problems of using them can be just as disasterous as the viruses they protect you from. But just as we've seen a few really experienced people in our lifetime, get taking out by the unexpected.. or being careless when they thought things were just fine, you need some kind of protection installed.
Another thing that will take your system down are natural disasters. Most common, is the thunderstorm. If a storm is coming, turn off your system and UNPLUG all components from the wall. Do not trust surge protectors. They are good for the every day use of power, but not a 10 million volt strike of lightning. Besides... it's not the power going off that causes the problem, it's the power coming back on that does... and a spike or surge of high voltage happens too fast for anyone to save their system before it's too late if you've left it plugged in.
tornato7
September 30, 2010 at 3:01pm
When I see someone who has 12 toolbars, along with the space wasting interface of a 10 year old version of internet explorer, waiting 30 seconds for a page to load because of all the viruses they have gotten, it makes me want to scream
KevFed
September 30, 2010 at 7:36am
You didnt mention how you shouldnt move your computer too much while it's turned on. Drives go bad real quick with enough g-shock...unless your roll with the big boys and use SSDs
dracx619
September 30, 2010 at 3:31am
my first build ever was met with probably one of the stupidest mistakes anyone can do...screwed in the mobo with no standoffs. i thought to myself "why does it look weird and WHY WONT IT TURN ON?" luckily, the board did not fry. i was like 14 and the only tech nut in training in my family so i guess it was ok?
StahnAileron
September 30, 2010 at 2:52pm
I had a co-worker come to me about looking at a new build he and a friend put together (the guy that helped him had transferred elsewhere by this this time.) I told him to bring it to work and I'd take a look during lunch and/or my breaks.
The problem he described was it not turning on. I cracked open the case and the first thought I had was (something doesn't look or feel right.) To make a long story short, the MB was affixed directly to the case (no standoffs) and while I was checking the status of the parts, I found the CPU was overly coated in thermal paste (like they applied a WHOLE tube of paste to it) AND they DID NOT REMOVE the adhesive plastic sheet from the HSF (you know, the type used to protect the mirror polish on some after-market coolers). So even if they had the MB mounted correctly, they woulda just fried the CPU eventually (or at least had continuous thermal shutdowns.)
The kicker to all this? The guy who helped this unfortunate co-worker was a pure Mac boy...(I knew that guy as well. When the co-worker told me who helped him, it clicked in my head because that guy had come to me a few months prior about helping him and a friend build a system. Neither had ever built a system from scratch.)
Eoraptor
September 30, 2010 at 11:16am
Fortunately my first two builds (okay, the first one was actually a REbuild of a P6-133) the cases had the stand-offs pressed in to the sheet metal. I wondered why they sent me all these little hexagonal risers and just stuffed em away *l* fortunately, but the time I bought my first midrange case, I was a bit wiser.
And of course, bonus points for workout, since that P6 case was a solid steel unit from gateway2000 and weighed a freaking ton!
iMo0n
September 30, 2010 at 8:01am
Wow. My first build was when I was 14 also. I bought all the components myself and assembled the entire thing in a couple of hours. Had no problems whatsoever and I am still using that computer today!
Specs:
AMD Phenom IIx2 555 BE
ATi Sapphire HD 5770 Juniper XT
2GB DDR2 @ 800MHz
Gigabyte GA-MA78LM-S2H
Oh btw, this was last year LOL.
dracx619
September 30, 2010 at 8:34am
you are lucky enough to have so many great resources nowadays. for me, this was 9 years ago and i didn't even know building your own computer was possible. needless to say, it was a fun experience. never made that mistake again! lol
Ry03
September 29, 2010 at 10:18pm
Any apple related software is just bloat, removing bonjour is so annoying.
mseyf
October 01, 2010 at 2:22pm
Ed Bott wrote an excellent guide on installing iTunes without all the other crud that comes along with it - works pretty sweet.
Eoraptor
September 30, 2010 at 4:41pm
I've managed to run for literally YEARS without using Jerktime. what a pig that thing is.
dizzy1
September 29, 2010 at 8:55pm
add the Perfect Paper password genarator to the list for generating impossible to remember passwords from grc.
486DieHard
October 05, 2010 at 9:38pm
- Leave your Hard Drive resting atop of your powersupply. A friend of mine blew two powersupplies that way.
- Leave your PC resting on the livingroom floor collecting dust for a year. An air compressor solved that problem after purchase... TY!
Eoraptor
September 29, 2010 at 6:53pm
Spinning fan't don't just hurt, they can do some serious damage... I was rockin an old Thermaltake (dragon or orb, either way it was a tall round orange/blue two-piece heatsink with a fan on top sucking air down in) on an Athlon XP cpu. I noticed an errant fan-wire running across the top of my sound card's very rough PCB and went to move it so it wouldn't short, and *WHING* off came the tip of my index finger thanks to that high speed little 40mm fan.
KevFed
September 30, 2010 at 7:44am
dude, i can stop a 40mm fan with my ballsack (ok maybe not). you might be thinking of the orb with the 120mm fan with the blue LEDs. i got my finger caught between that and the f-ing sharp fins of death while trying to "pick off" some dust bunnies.
reutnes
September 29, 2010 at 5:50pm
Back in my newbie days, I decided to unseat a RAM module and forgot to unplug the machine first. A huge POP and some smoke came out. Teacher gave me a dirty look.
haxden
September 29, 2010 at 3:58pm
ive decided to roll around naked until some malware gets to me because i need to reinstall my OS anyway due to loads of freeware and demos which popup alot.
Zachary K.
September 29, 2010 at 5:10pm
trying to give yourself a reason to reinstall? if you want to expedite your getting a virus, try googling "give me a virus" or "screw my computer" let me know the results.
Nickompoop
September 29, 2010 at 4:41pm
How long have you been doing this? It could be an interesting experiment in determining how safe the internet is.
Velox
September 30, 2010 at 12:57am
I haven't used anti-virus software since 2005. Have not had a single problem. Common sense in web surfing goes a long way. My ISP does scan my emails before I download them and they do catch some viruses every so often but again, all these emails are nothing I would have opened anyways.
Caboose
September 30, 2010 at 7:33am
You sound just like my wife's cousin.
"ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE IS A GIANT SCAM!"
Right... Thats why he has a constant stream of customers in to his shop (and some are return... to have another virus removed).
You know, as long as you're smart about it, and wash your hands, you don't need to get a booster shot, or vaccinated against something. Why bother?
bikerbub
September 29, 2010 at 5:53pm
you could start with trying to buy some clothes from the retailers who spam MPC!
