By Phil Dotree
Laptop computer owners can be hard on their computers, and their hard drives can bear the brunt of the damage. This causes many laptop drives to fail before their time.
It's impossible to completely prevent a hard drive from failing, but here are a few tips to help you maintain your laptop's hard disk, helping it last longer and run better.
1. Watch what your laptop's sitting on. One of the biggest causes of hard drive failure is heat--an overheating computer, of course, means an overheating hard drive, so you want to take measures to avoid running your laptop in high-temperature environments. Laptops dispense heat differently, but usually whatever a laptop's sitting on will become hot, so you want that to be a surface that conducts heat away from a laptop, not just back into it. Keep your laptop off of rugs and out of small, enclosed spaces while it's running.
2. Turn off your laptop when it's not running. If you can decrease the amount of time that your laptop spends accessing its hard drive, do it--it stands to reason that this will prolong the operating life of the hard drive, since, well, it's operating less when it doesn't need to be. You don't want to cycle the laptop too much, though, so you can keep it on or put it in standby if you're not going to be using it for thirty minutes or so, but you do plan on coming back to it.
3. Keep your laptop on a surge protector. Laptop users seem to think that the "keep your computer on a surge protector" rule doesn't apply to them for some reason, but every computer owner needs to watch out for electrical surges that could fry their devices or send a slight hiccup to their hard drives, causing a premature failure. If you travel with your laptop, bring a surge protector along.
4. Perform basic computer maintenance. Likewise, it's important to defrag and run scandisk on your laptop on a regular basis, as this takes some of the pressure off of the read/write heads of your laptop's hard drive, allowing them to find free space without jumping all over the hard drive surface. This decreased activity leads to increased performance life. Also, remember to include data backup as part of your computer's maintenance--all hard drives will eventually fail, no matter how well you take care of them.
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You may want to check out my other guide on Laptop Charger and Laptop Motherboard
