External Hard Drive Preventive Maintenance

You want to keep your Hard Drive with all important data in best shape? Danz Family provides you detailed step-by-step instructions on how to do so, with nice illustration of all steps. But before starting to follow the instructions, read the manual to the end first! Please!

Many of the problems encountered by users of hard drive storage devices can be avoided by simple annual maintenance. You clean and maintenance your car and other things around the house, why should your hard drive be any different? You've defragged, run other maintenance programs, but have you bothered to open it up and give it a good cleaning? For optimal hard drive performance, follow the easy steps below. (As always, read through all the instructions before beginning.)

Gently pry around the edges of your hard drive case and separate the cover from the main unit. It just pops off. Don't worry about any small plastic pieces that break off, they won't affect anything.

Time to start unscrewing screws! These are the easy ones, a simple Phillips screwdriver will do the trick.

Keep going, some of the screws are a little hidden. Be sure to save the screws for reassembly later.

Finally, we get everything unscrewed and unplugged from the hard drive, wrapped in thick foil in the center.

Carefully peal away the thick sticky foil from the hard drive.

Once you get all the foil off, you'll have to remove the screws from the hard drive itself. Some are hidden under stickers and all are the uncommon torx type. By this point you've probably figured out that the manufacturer hasn't made it easy for you to perform maintenance on your hard drive. Duh, that's because they are in the business of selling hard drives! Imagine if other manufacturers could convince consumers never to clean or maintain their product? What a scam!

Here's one of the hard drive's reading/writing heads. Oops, is that a scratch? Ha, ha, don't worry, modern drive's aren't affected by little surface scratches. Have you ever seen the back of some CD's and how scratched up they are but still play perfectly? Hard drives are far more technologically advanced and are even less affected by simple surface scratches.

In fact, feel free to scratch up the surface all you want. At this point in the process, I can promise you, you won't adversely affect the hard drive's performance. Some people like to scratch in the date, so they can tell the next time they open up their hard drive when the last time was that they cleaned it.

If you happen to bend the read/write head, don't worry, just bend it back. Be sure to press it down real good so it's as close as possible to the drive's surface.

Time to give everything a good wash! A little dish soap, some warm water and a scrub brush. Don't hold back with the elbow grease! Give it a good scrubbing.

Finally, you may find that some of the parts have worked themselves loose and are just spinning around uncontrolled. Good thing we caught this before it completely spun itself apart! Get yourself a hammer or a hatchet and pound them down until they are solidly in place. Once everything dries, reverse the steps to reassemble your hard drive.

In the first paragraph I promised "optimal hard drive performance." Following the steps above is the only way to absolutely guarantee you will never again loose valuable data and time to a failed hard drive. I know I'm certain the drive pictured will never again cause me problems!!! Not to mention, sometimes it just feels good to get "hands on."

As you might understand already, this manual is a pure joke. If you follow it precisely, you may be confident that your data is lost forever. Actually, simply opening the Hard Drive at your home environment will make a trick. The dust contamination will make it absolutely un-useful and unrecoverable. So, what can you do externally to keep the Hard Drive in best shape? I do not mean useful software to clean, defragment, and fix error. I really mean – externally. If the Hard Drive is internal, use vacuum cleaner once a while to remove dust from inside the PC. Be careful not to touch any wiring thou. If the drive is external, assure the adequate ventilation and fresh air access. Do not keep it on the mild surface, which might cause its overheating.


I also found that in spite of the fact that some of the external drives are designed to be positioned vertically as well, it is preferable to keep it horizontally, when the spinning forces less affect the internal mechanics.


And, no matter what you do, and how careful you are, keep the backup of the most valuable information!

Office XP Problem: Text File Stops Responding at Initialization

Have you ever experienced that when you open text file through your Microsoft Word in Windows XP operating system, a program seems to hang before it opens or may appear to stop responding at all?

If positive, you are suffering from the known problem that is affecting the MS Word files operation in this Operating System. We will offer you the basic action plan to troubleshoot the listed annoyance.

Turn OFF file indexing on the drive(s), where you are trying to open files. In "My Computer" right click on the drive and select "Properties". UNCHECK "Allow indexing service xxxxx". In most cases, this simple operation will resolve your issues.

If the problem will not go away, most likely, it is related to the recent history folder of Windows. This problem might appear on different machines with different hardware but all with Office XP and Windows XP (with default settings). Note that the symptoms might be slightly different on different computers. There are two known solutions to resolve the issue:

1) Temporary solution: Delete all files in the following folder.
C:’Documents and Settings’(Your User Name goes Here)’Application
Data’Microsoft’Office’Recent.

If the temporary solution resolves your issue, you can follow up to perform the permanent solution, presented below.

2) Permanent solution: Disable the recent history.

* Access the registry through built-in registry editor regedit, or any other third-party registry editor, available on the market.

* Backup your registry first (export to file at the predetermined location). Every registry operation, especially by inexperienced user might be a threat to the system functionality. If something goes wrong, you can always restore the initial registry status by loading the backup registry patch.

* Open your registry and find the following key in the HKCU registry branch.
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER’Software’Microsoft’Windows’CurrentVersion’Policies’Explorer].

* Create a new DWORD value, or modify the existing value called ’NoRecentDocsHistory’. Set the value to equal ’1’ to enable the restriction.
Data Type: REG_DWORD (DWORD Value)
Value Data: (0 = disable restriction, 1 = enable restriction).

* Open the registry and find the following key in the HKLM branch.
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE’Software’Microsoft’Windows’CurrentVersion’Policies’Explorer].

* Create a new DWORD value, or modify the existing value called ’NoRecentDocsHistory’. Set the value to equal ’1’ to enable the restriction.
Data Type: REG_DWORD (DWORD Value)
Value Data: (0 = disable restriction, 1 = enable restriction).

Sources and additional information:
http://www.compu-help.us/215.htm
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/833041
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/313937