Computer Services

Presently, we have not fully implemented this service, although we hope to in the near future. At the immediate time only those who presently are clients of Office Overload Rescuers will normally be serviced, although we encourage all who are interested to further inquire by calling, e-mail or submitting inquiries through our form found on our Contact Us page.

Some of the services we plan to offer or will to present clients follow:

• basic installation of a PC's operating system
• attachment of peripherials (such as printers, scanners, etc.)
• replacement of failed parts
• repair/upgrading of operating system after virus attack
• resizing of present partitions
• installations of secondary operating systems such as Linux for dual booting
• basic networking configuration

Although backups are clearly the most important preventive maintenance tasks to take when it comes to using a personal computer, an often overlooked one is maintaining a clean computer. Too often computers are operated until they break down.

But what is the advantage to cleaning a computer? A house will still function if it isn't well dusted. With an electronic machine such as a computer, it's far different. First, dustballs inside the computer can easily lead to excessive heat buildup. This in turn can lead to problems such as an overheating processor at one extreme down to more common problems as a greater temperature extreme between a computer's on/off states and thus thermal stress problems. This of course leads to shorter system life.

Also, dust and dirt can contain certain conductive elements which can mean short circuits within the system. You should also be aware that dust and dirt can lead to corrosion of certain electrical contact points within the computer, short circuits, and just plain inefficient cooling by our system fans.

While hard disk(s) are sealed units which basically make it impossible for dirt to enter, in theory, a piece of hair or even a fingerprint would be sufficiently thick enough to cause a small disk crash, since the read/write heads of the drive are separated from its platters by no more than a few micro-inches.

Theory aside, the most valid concern when speaking of foreign substances entering a hard drive's interior is a dusty and dirty environment. However, a valid concern when addressing this subject is cigarette smoking near a computer. A single particle is somewhat larger than the separation. Here we may be talking about the potential loss of a few bytes of information. Also, it has been found that cigarettes contain chemicals that not only conduct electricity, but cause corrosion of computer parts.

Determining just how often one should have their computer cleaned has much to do with environmental factors. Are we situated in an office or located in a dusty warehouse?

©June 2001 Paul J. Twardy, Office Overload Rescuers