How to Prolong the Life of a Laptop Hard Drive

Laptop #computer owners can be hard on their <b>computers</b>, and their hard drives can bear the brunt
of the damage. This causes many laptop drives to fail
before their time.
It's impossible to completely prevent a hard drive
from failing, but here are a few tips to help you
maintain your laptop's hard disk, helping it last longer
and run better.
Watch what your laptop's sitting on. One of the
biggest causes of hard drive failure is heat--an
overheating computer, of course, means an
overheating hard drive, so you want to take
measures to avoid running your laptop in high-
temperature environments.
Laptops dispense heat differently, but usually
whatever a laptop's sitting on will become hot, so
you want that to be a surface that conducts heat
away from a laptop, not just back into it. Keep your
laptop off of rugs and out of small, enclosed spaces
while it's running.
Turn off your laptop when it's not running. If you can
decrease the amount of time that your laptop spends
accessing its hard drive, do it--it stands to reason that
this will prolong the operating life of the hard drive,
since, well, it's operating less when it doesn't need to
be. You don't want to cycle the laptop too much,
though, so you can keep it on or put it in standby if
you're not going to be using it for thirty minutes or
so, but you do plan on coming back to it.
Keep your laptop on a surge protector. Laptop users
seem to think that the "keep your computer on a
surge protector" rule doesn't apply to them for some
reason, but every computer owner needs to watch
out for electrical surges that could fry their devices or
send a slight hiccup to their hard drives, causing a
premature failure. If you travel with your laptop,
bring a surge protector along. Discover more about
laptop safety measures from Bestprogramminglapt
op.com.
Perform basic computer maintenance. Likewise, it's
important to defrag and run scandisk on your laptop
on a regular basis, as this takes some of the pressure
off of the read/write heads of your laptop's hard
drive, allowing them to find free space without
jumping all over the hard drive surface.
This decreased activity leads to increased
performance life. Also, remember to include data
backup as part of your computer's maintenance--all
hard drives will eventually fail, no matter how well
you take care of them.
Do you have any other tips for prolonging a laptop
hard drive's operating life? Post in comments section
below.
About Guest Author
Elizabeth Diane is from Best Programming Laptops.
Specializes on best and most suitable laptop for
programming. You can visit her site via
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