Hey gang,
This post has no LBC content, but please read on. What it does
cover is house hold electronic equipment safety.
I've posted 2 previous items dealing with this topic in the past.
Unfortunately, I did not keep them, consequently I can't repost them.
So I'll start from scratch.
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First of all, I want to address electrical (thunder) storms. I've
been playing with "home computers" since their inception. One of the nicest
advances had been in the field of modems, the direct connect in particular.
While this have been a great boom they have
also brought a lot of trouble. There have beem more computers damaged or
distroyed by thunder storms then any other force. In particularly,
lightening coming in on the phone line.
Last night we had a pretty bad thunder storm in my area. Luckily, I
had unplugged the modem from the telephone line and pulled the power
plug for the outlet strip (that powers all my computer equipment)
from the AC wall outlet.
We took one lightening strike with 200 ft of the house. It came in
on the telephone line and took out all electronic equipment (two
cordless telephone bases) there were still connected. In addition,
I lost my door bell and a light bulb. We must have gotten a real
spike on the AC power lines as well.
Talking to 2 other neighbors that have cable TV (which I don't) the
spike appears to have also come in on the cable line. One neighbor
lost a VCR which was the 1st device on her cable line. From the VCR
she feeds the rest of the TVs in the house. Another neighbor lost
a TV. Apparently, it was the 1st device on the cable line.
So a word of **caution**!. We all were lucky. No single family has
more than about $250 worth of damage.
You may not be able to totally prevent any damage but you can minimize it.
a. Disconnect all electronic devices from the telephone line.
b. Unplug all *valuable* electronic equipment from their AC
outlets. Simply turning them off **will not** work!
c. If possible, to reduce the number of items to unplug, use a
multi outlet strip (preferably with a surge suppressor in them)
to connect electronic equipment to the AC outlets. For
instance, my entertainment console consists of the following
equipment: a 21" TV, a sterio receiver, a cassette deck, CD
player, VCR, a Nintendo, and a tape rewinder. All these are
fed off of one outlet strip. So to unplug **all** the equipment
I only have to unplug 1 power cord.
d. Disconnect any TVs from you cable.
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The other topic I want to just touch on is our computers. It's not
worth the loss of equipment, data, or money to leave our computers
on, connected to a telephone line, or connected to the AC outlets.
Regardless of storms, be sure to back up your system regularly.
The main thing we want to protect is our data. The hardware and
software vendors leave the problem of our user data storage to us.
While I'm running a PC clone I'm sure the following holds true for the MACs
also.
The more subdirectories off the root the harder it is to back up. I
have 4 people in my house that use the computer, me, my wife (MAC),
and the 2 boys (JohnC and ScottE). Each of us has our own directory
off the root. Under each users subdirectory we have many subdirectories
depending on what we use the computer for. For instance, the kids both have
a WP (word processing) directory. Under
that there is a subdir. for school, under that, there is one for each
grade, and in some, subdirs. for subject. The point here is to try
to have a single starting point for a backup of the data.
Many people have tape backup. But usually this takes quite some
time. I can back up all 4 users with a batch file in less than
5 minutes. My directory contain the most data, over 12 megs that
compresses down to under 4 megs. I keep several backups on my
secondary hard drive, and periodically back them off to floppy. I'm the
only user who's data takes more than 1 floppy if I do a
full backup as opposed to an incremental. (If you are a turnkey user
and need more info please email me with you questions.)
In addition to the user data, our Operating System (OS) is the next
mess. If you are using MS-DOS and Windows or Windows For Workgroups,
when you load a new application, it puts stuff all over the disk. So
after any new application is loaded, it is a good idea to backup your
Windows directory.
I had a crash on my primary drive, which contains my OS, users
directories, drivers for my printers, sound card, CD ROMs, and some
applications. Most applications reside on my secondary drive. My
system came with MS-DOS 6.0 and Windows. I've since upgraded to
MS-DOS 6.2 and Windows for Workgroups (WFW). After the crash I
reloaded MS-DOS 6.2 and WFW. However, a lot of the functions would
not work. Inparticularly my sound card. I had to go back and start
the reload from the original CD-ROM and reload MS-DOS 6.0 and Windows 3.0
from the vendors. They had already configured many of the devices
and there was no way of configuring them after the fact. (All attempts
at configuring the devices failed. I even had several emails to the
vendor - with no luck - until I started from scratch.) Then I started
adding all the upgrades. After a sum total of 40 hours of work, I got
the drive rebuilt. I can probably do that in about 3 hours now.
However, I could do it within 15 minutes if I had a backup of my
MS-DOS and WFW directories.
So the moral of the story here is: backup, backup, backup!
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If anyone is interested, I have written a batch file for doing my
backups. The users directories are ZIPed to a temporary directory
(for speed) and them can be optionally moved to floppy. It includes
both full and incremental backups. If you are interested in a copy
of this file (it will have to be modified for your needs - I'll help
you if you aren't a batch programmer) let me know.
I also have a document that I wrote for work for a standard
configuration of our PCs. I use this same configuration at home.
If interested in this please let know.
Please send me email directly requesting either of these items.
Sorry for the long none LBC post, but I feel that it is sooo relevent
as this is how we communicate about the LBCs.
John
John T. Blair WA4OHZ email: jblair@exis.net
Va. Beach, Va Phone: (757) 495-8229
48 TR1800 48 #4 Midget 65 Morgan 4/4 Series V
75 Bricklin SV1 77 Spitfire
The one with the most toys, wins!
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