When Dealing with Weather, Don’t Forget to Keep your Computers Happy

With numerous US cities setting record highs every day, keeping your computer cool can be a big challenge. A few common-sense precautions will help.

1. Give your computer access to plenty of air. Clear those stacks of paper off your computer chassis, pull it out of the corner, and make sure its fans are unobstructed and operating properly.

2. Speaking of fans – take the cover off your computer and make sure your fans are clean. If it’s gunked up with dust and pet hair, it won’t be able to run efficiently. A can of compressed air is an excellent choice for blowing out dust without touching any of the delicate components.

3. Move your computer to a place where it doesn’t have to work so hard to cool itself. If it’s sitting in bright sunlight or if it’s right near an appliance that generates a lot of heat (like a projector, for example), it’s already at a disadvantage.

It’s hurricane season, too. If you’re heading out on vacation from a hurricane-prone area, or if there’s one on the way, review the following suggestions.

1. Get expensive equipment up off the floor. Even mild flooding can cause major damage to thousands of dollars worth of computer equipment.

2. Run a full backup and test it to make sure you could restore your system in the event of a major data loss. We’ve spoken with countless business owners who run backups but never test them, and then they’re shocked to find out their “business-critical” backups are corrupted or incomplete.

3. If you have an onsite backup system, great. If you have an offsite backup as well, that’s even better. And if your offsite backup is far away in a secure location that’s not prone to major weather events, that’s best.

4. Write down all your software product keys, license numbers, passwords, configuration notes, and encryption codes and put them in a locked safe -- preferably both on premises and off.

5. Have a plan in place so that if a major disaster occurs while you’re away, other people in the office know how to contact each other and what procedures to follow in order to get your business systems running again. This includes writing down the sequence in which applications, servers, and databases need to be brought back online in order for data to properly repopulate.