Travel nearly half the year to all the distant corners of the world, and I cannot conceive of going out of the door without my laptop. I've transferred funds to pay my children's college tuition from Ua Pou in the Marquesas Islands of the South Pacific. I've exchanged e- mails with my investment advisor from Cape Horn at the tip of South America. I've sent IMs and video mail from Svalbard near the North Pole. I've walked the back alleys of St. Petersburg searching for open WiFi routers so I could make free phone calls on the internet.
If my laptop computer had ever 1) been stolen or left behind, 2) dropped from an outrigger canoe into the Great Barrier Reef, or 3) fallen to the floor whilst computing from Chile, I could well have suffered an almost incalculable loss far beyond the value of plastic, silicon, and metal. The laptop- equipped road warrior flies in the face of three major threats:
- Losing a machine worth hundreds or thousands.
- Losing the contents of the hdd (or other storage medium). The drive can fail because of old age or physical damage incurred while out on the road, or it can be stolen (combined with the rest of the laptop). The contents of your hard drive may be worth 1000s of dollars to you; it may be worth even more to a thief who can quickly harvest bank account and credit card numbers and other personal information.
- Electronic theft of data sent from or to your machine: the sneakiest form of cyber crime. A moderately clever crook can send spyware over the web or even pluck data from the wireless signals that engulf us at home, at work, and traveling.
Be careful out there. In this article, I offer some tips about how to become a smart road warrior.
Living with the Dead and the Dying
Way back in Book I of this tome I said there are only 2 kinds of hard disk drives: the dead and the dying. I know that sounds harsh, but trust me: anyone who keeps this in mind will enjoy a happier, carefree life. At least in terms of time spent using a computer.
You should understand this because hard disk drives are the hardest working mechanical device in your machine. There exists a motor within that spins more than one magnetizable platters. Another moves two or more read/write heads inside and out on the platter to find data. And yet another thing: those tiny read/write heads float a few hair- widths away from the spinning platters. And in the special circumstances of a laptop computer, this takes place within a sealed box that exists within another sealed box a place that can build up significant heat and is intended to move from place to place: desk to desk, from home to the airport and across the nation. Occasionally it takes a tumble. The following disasters (and more) are just waiting to happen:
- The main motor may overheat and grind to a halt.
- A buildup of heat may affect the platters or the read/write heads.
- The read/write heads may fall to the surface of the spinning platter or bounce into it, plowing into the delicate surface and scraping away data or indexes to its location.
- Moving on your travels, your laptop may one day take a tumble off the X- ray belt at the airport, fall in the pool at the hotel, or be run over by an eighteen- wheeler on the road. None of these are good for the life of your laptop's hard disk drive.
Doesn't this cause you to feel so very confident with your laptop? Tick, tick, tick: Its time is running out.
I'm not saying that the typical laptop hard disk drive will have a shelf life of a gallon of milk. You can reasonably expect several years of service from a drive; if you behave properly and are careful, the drive may last five or more years which is quite likely longer than the useful life of the laptop itself.
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08202010
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