The User’s EasyGuide to
Adapted from the novelette, Nerdism Made
Easy, by D. McBride
WHAT THEY ARE:
Lurking deep within the cases of most modern computers are many integral parts, all working in chorus to bring meaning to the computing existence. The keyboard, once mastered, becomes our slave to accept our thoughts and carry them into the computer. The monitor screen, once properly adjusted, reflects our conveyed thoughts in legibility never before realized. The mouse or similar tracking device, once mastered, similarly conveys our wishes to the computer in near automatic fashion. As long as power continues to flow from the wall socket to sustain our digital marvel, our words and thoughts continue to flow into it, are displayed by it and are held ever so securely within.
Well,
not really. Computers, related to copy
machines and sometimes known to display some of the same evil traits, hold our
expressed genius for just so long. How
long is that?
Well, as they say on Wall Street, it
depends.
The
RAM
(Random Access Memory) or ‘memory chips’ of a computer hold our thoughts for
only as long as power is applied without interruption to the computer. In a real world where we are forced to share
our lives with non-computing activities and forsake our computer for hours at a
time, however, we need some ability to store our thoughts even when the
computer is, albeit reluctantly, turned off.
WHY
WE NEED THEM:
We’ve
all had the experience of saving our information to removable diskettes or
floppy disks, ever decreasing in size and now most popular in the 3.5”
near-square shirt-pocket size, and capable of holding well over a million
individual letters, characters or obscure symbols. This is great, but diskettes are slow and believe it or not, a
million characters is just not sufficient storage for our boundless
genius. Although diskettes have
decreased in size physically and greatly increased in the amount of data they
can hold, they are just too limiting.
Enter
the early Winchester or first hard drives in personal computers. Depicted as a spinning drum but actually
composed of a series of spinning glass platters, these mechanical (key word here) devices can and do hold the equivalent
of many, many diskettes. Able to store
the ever increasing immensity of new software programs like the word processor
used to compose this treatise, the diversity of multiple type fonts and then of
course, the necessity to store every imaginable graphic, hard drives are really
essential in modern computing.
WHAT
THEY WILL DO:
Hard
drives or as they are sometimes called, internal drives, that once held the
equivalent of five modern 3.5” diskettes, now hold not millions, but billions
or more bytes of data. A byte is not the smallest particle of data,
but may be compared to the molecule of matter in science. Just as a molecule is composed of smaller
particles calls atoms, and we’ll leave our science lesson at this point, bytes
are composed of even smaller parts called bits. Bits were once very popular with true white-sock nerds trained in
talking to computers in their native language (machine language, of course)
have been relegated to obscurity by the ever popular byte. Even our friend the byte, once common, has
been upstaged by his larger brother the kilobyte (KB) or 1000 bytes,
probably the most popular brother, the megabyte (MB) or a million bytes,
and the newer big guy on campus, the gigabit (GB) a billion bytes. Lest you think for even a second that the
end is in sight, the new standard in larger dimensions of bytes is the tetrabyte
(TB). Can we guess how many bytes are
in a tetrabyte? See a pattern
here? We’ll consider ourselves
thoroughly “byten” at this point, however.
Now
that we feel pretty comfortable with the necessity of our mechanical marvel,
the hard drive, let’s consider just how precious it is. Haven’t we have all heard that we don’t
realize just how important something is until we lose it? Just ask someone who lost their data from a
failed diskette or, and you could see this coming couldn’t you, a “crashed”
hard drive, and true sorrow is obvious.
Just as the reliability of a modern transistor radio is taken for
granted by all but those old enough to remember periodic failures of vacuum
tube sets, we can accept that the internal circuitry of a modern computer is
most likely to last reliably until and beyond the point of obsolescence. Even the cathode ray tube (CRT) monitor used
on most desktop computers is amazingly reliable these days. Diskettes are not as trustworthy, as most of
us have experienced, but since they aren’t used as frequently as in the past,
it is of little consequence. Our new
security, the hard drive, however, is the remaining mechanical part in a modern
computer with a very finite life. Like
it’s brother the copy machine, it will fail.
And when it does, ... well, read on please.
WHEN
WILL THEY DO IT:
Our
hard drive accepts and returns our trusted data with the help of very
lightweight disk “heads” on the ends of lightweight alloy fingers that move them
in and out across but only microns from the surface of the spinning
platters. With the platters spinning at
very high speeds and the limited tolerance between these moving parts, the very
thin magnetic media upon the platters prone to damage, one can almost picture
the potential for damage when the computer table is inadvertently bumped on our
way to the refrigerator. Not that
anyone would ever bring food back to his or her computer area, of course.
We
all know that we are not to insert or withdraw a diskette from the disk drive
when the busy light is illuminated, indicating a ‘read’ or ‘write’ activity by
the computer to the disk. And the hard
drive seems safe from such trouble with its location within the computer
case. But we do all witness some of the
impact of our frequent electrical storms on our electric power delivery
system. When our electricity has an
intermittent induced ‘spike’ or similar potentially catastrophic product of a
nearby storm, it is the hard drive that is most likely to experience pain. This pain may not result in immediately
apparent damage, but perhaps at a later time.
Being mechanical, the hard drive has parts that are in near constant use
and are in the process of wearing out, and working toward the doomsday of a
“crash”. When it will crash is no more
known that that of our own demise, but just as sure.
WHAT
CAN WE DO TO PREVENT IT?
Hard
drives store data in small groups that don’t always stay together. As we use our computer, it is frequently
writing data to the hard drive and erasing it.
“Holes” appear in what may once have been a contiguous block of
data. The uncaring manager of data
transfer and storage, DOS (Disk Operating System), inserts new data into these
holes. Through normal use, these filled
holes and continued “fragmentation” of our hard drive data add to the potential
for disaster. Since the computer does
not do well in reading broken “chains” of data from any device, it would seem
to be in everyone’s best interest if we can put our data back into continuous
formation on a regular basis.
Fortunately,
most modern DOS or Windows 95 operating systems include
a utility to accomplish this task with a minimum of pain. For DOS or Windows
3.x machines, a defragmentation utility can be purchased or is usually
included with most versions of DOS 6 and newer. Windows 95 has its own defragmentation utility that is called
from the START menu tree. Any of these
helpful utilities will restore a mechanically stable hard drive to an orderly
storage of our trusted data with regular use.
Sometimes,
however, physical damage can occur to the very thin electromagnetic media on
the surface of the hard drive platters.
When this happens, and unfortunately it frequently does, parts of our
hard drive are rendered unusable. DOS
or the disk operating system within the “firmware” (preprogrammed software in
computer chips within your machine) may detect such areas of damage or weakness
and work around them. Earlier Macintosh
(TM) computers were reported to have proficiency at such automatic
safeguarding of our data. More
frequently, however, it falls upon the user to take some periodic measure to
ensure that any errant areas of the hard drive are blocked out from future data
storage.
WHAT
CAN WE DO TO PREPARE FOR IT?
A
prudent user is well advised to “back up” their data to another hard drive or
to diskettes on a regular basis. It is
a happy user who can take his backup diskette to another computer and continue
their work unscathed by the crash of their own computer.
With
either a commercially available utility or the SCANDISK utility of DOS
6.x, the user can periodically examine the hard drive and help prevent what
could well be a disaster.
It
has been recommended that we wear seat belts, eat healthy diets rich in fiber
and run SCANDISK or a similar utility every two weeks. Moreover, the prudent computer user may wish
to run DEFRAG or a similar data defragmentation utility perhaps once a
week on a heavily used machine.
So,
therefore a prudent computer user, or at least those that wish to maintain the
integrity and security of their work, will back up their data on a regular
basis to diskette, another hard drive, a removable drive of which many now
proliferate the market, or a removable backup data tape system.
The
commercial software on the computer can always be restored from the original
CD-ROMs or diskettes, but our creative individual genius can never be replaced
if lost. A word, or a few, to the wise.
Happy and safe computing.