or you may carry it with regularly to interoffice meetings or college lectures.
Or your laptop may only get up and go a few times a year. So adjust your
cleaning and maintenance schedule to fit your particular calendar.
Whatever you do, begin by making a safe home for your laptop. Don’t leave it
perched on the corner of a desk or on the edge of a shelf; keep it out of direct
sun and away from heating and cooling vents. Take care not to place anything
heavy on top of the LCD cover. And spend the time to properly stow away or
move out of tripping range any cables attached to the laptop.
Consult the instruction manual from the maker of your machine for advice on
whether they recommend you keep an unused machine constantly plugged
into an AC adapter to keep the battery fully charged. In some designs this
couldshorten the life of the battery; on the other hand, leaving the battery
with an AC source for an extended period of time could result in its depletion,
which could cause you to lose configuration settings in the system BIOS.
(Your data and programs on the hard disk are safe, since they don’t require
power to retain information; see Chapter 6 for more on BIOS.) The other
downside to leaving the machine unplugged is that may not be ready to go if
you have an unexpected need for the machine. The fact is that a replacement
battery isn’t that expensive, especially for popular models from well-known
manufacturers. If the original battery comes to the end of its life or doesn’t
hold a charge for a sufficient period of time, you should be able to get a new
battery for $100 or less.
So, unless you travel as much as I do, your schedule should be different than
mine. But for the record, here’s how I care and feed my laptop:
It has its own table, off to the side of my desk and secure from accidental
tumbles.
I keep the AC adapter plugged into the laptop at all times and attached
to a wall current on the protected side of a heavy-duty power surge
protector.The machine is attached by an Ethernet cable to a nearby router, allow-
ing me to quickly download files before I set out on a trip. It also lets
me update the antivirus and adware/spyware definitions through the
broadband Internet connection on the router. I also connect to Microsoft’s
Windows Update for operating system patches and revisions. (Actually, I
use Windows XP’s facility to perform automatic updates to any machine
that has a broadband connection.) See Chapter 13 for details about
goodies like Ethernet and routers.
When I return from a trip, the first thing I do is transfer any new files
from the laptop to my desktop system and make sure that I keep my
backup copies of files current. Depending on the project, I either main-
tain a second copy of all of my work on a separate, removable hard
drive, burn new files to a CD, or do both.Chapter 2: How to Treat a Laptop 21