Chapter 3: Prevention: Limiting Your Risk

Overview

Common sense—not a computer degree—tells you that there is one best way to deal with a disaster.

Don’t get yourself into one in the first place.

Unfortunately, you can’t always avoid all the potential hazards, but you can certainly take measures designed to reduce

• conditions that might contribute to a disaster

• the degree of your losses should you experience one.

Toward that end, I’ve devoted this chapter to what could best be described as PC health and the steps you can take to keep it out of harm’s way. That harm can be a disaster, but it’s actually more likely to be misuse. Users are, after all, sometimes their PC’s worst enemy, and they’re far more likely to strike than a tsunami, a tornado, or a terrorist.

I don’t use the word “health” glibly either because you need a system that is both protected and in good operating order or you risk one of the most common kinds of disaster: hardware that fails prematurely from abuse. You can’t afford a dead CPU or a dying hard drive any more when you’re on a big deadline for school, work, or a community project than you can when rains penetrate your roof or your part of the power grid goes down.

Pair the recommendations in this chapter with the disaster recovery plan you design and implement in the next chapter, and you should substantially trim your concerns about your PC and its files and applications.