
How to stop heat, storms and lightning strikes killing your computers
By Steve Ranger
Published: 4 July 2006 09:00 GMT
It's not just humans that are starting to suffer in the hot weather. Soaring temperatures are already creating an epidemic of frazzled hard drives and more PCs are likely to fall victim to lightning strikes and flooding in the storms expected later this week.
With the onset of the hot weather, data recovery company Ontrack said it is on its way to its busiest summer ever. The company's business development manager Phil Bridge told silicon.com: "We do get a definite peak in jobs over the summer every year."
Heat and humidity are a big factor in the rise in demand for data recovery but Bridge said that the increase in mobile working in the summer is another factor, as workers take their laptops out to enjoy the sunshine. "We see laptops that are filled with sand and seawater," he said.
On top of this, IT managers - like everyone else - are on their holidays and that means data is less likely to be backed up as conscientiously as it is when they are in the office.
When staff get back to the office the danger for PCs isn't over - Bridge warns that rebooting a machine after it has had a long rest could be just enough to send the hard drive over the edge. And the storms that follow hot weather hold dangers for hardware too - power surges, floods and lightning strikes can all send PCs to the big server room in the sky.
Ontrack has come up with 10 top tips to keep your systems running happily through the heat.
What are your tips for coping with the heatwave? We would love to hear from you - and publish the better suggestions - especially if you are a SME operating without air-conditioning.
1. Make sure your computer has good cooling (don't...
Infernoz
1. Make sure you keep that nice cold drink well aw...
Anonymous
If like us you are a small company (10 or less) a...
Anonymous
We are going back to a paper and card system. Gett...
Anonymous
On hot days, turn off your PC. Slap on some factor...
Anonymous
You must be professional and have very good telephone manner in order to handle calls from users who have problems with their computers ie laptops, ...
You should also have some experience of building, rebuilding and configuring customer PCs and laptops. We are currently looking to recruit a 2nd Line ...
Our government client has an opportunity for a temporary IT Deployment Engineer (for a term of up to five months) to assist the Operations Team in ...
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