Many people love to hide their tower inside their desks. Have you ever opened the door on the front of your desk and just felt the heat flow out of your desk? While it’s nice to have somewhere to put the PC hidden out of site, you might consider making sure you have proper airflow.

If you’re going to keep your system running inside of a desk, make sure that you either don’t have a back on the desk to allow the hot air to escape.

Another option would be to cut a couple of holes in the back or another hidden area to allow for airflow.

Your computer generates a lot of heat and has fans inside the case to exhaust this heat, but if you’re storing your PC inside a cubby hole slightly larger than the case itself, you’re not allowing the hot air to exhaust and this will keep the components inside getting very hot which can damage some of these components.

Yet another option is to leave the door open where the heat can exhaust out the front. As long as you leave room for airflow, your components should be safe from heat damage.

If you have Windows XP and don’t have AT LEAST 512MB, No.

If you have Windows Vista and don’t have AT LEAST 2 GB, No.

More than likely, if you do much more than check your e-mail and open Internet Exploder (not a typo), you probably need 1GB of memory.

I say you need 2GB for Windows Vista because I’ve seen systems almost every day out of the box that have 1GB and most of that is being used up.

Random Access Memory (RAM) is used by your computer as temporary storage space for data. It has no moving parts like a phyiscal hard drive. It has higher bus speed.

When you fill your memory with programs your computer is actively using, it has no choice but to start writing things off to the hard drive and this slows down your system.

If you right click on your task bar (the bar that runs across the screen from the Start button to the clock), choose “Task Manager”. Next, choose the “Performance” tab. A decent measure for you to know if you should get more memory to speed up your system is to look at the “PF Usage” (on windows) and . If this number is very close to or higher than your physical memory amount, you need more memory!

Hope this gives you a good scale for choosing. Memory is cheap and easy to install these days. You CAN have too much memory, but it’s rare!

One thing often overlooked when setting up a system is the Surge Protection or UPS.

A UPS offers some protection against surges, but it’s still a good idea to plug the surge protector into the wall and the UPS into the surge protector. Worse case, you’re saving the surge protector a few surges.

A UPS offers a battery backup system. When setup properly, it will gracefully shut down your computer system after a pre-determined time period. This prevents your system from just turning off like it was unplugged during power failure. In order to get the best results from a UPS, you should plug in limited equipment into it. Perhaps only the PC and the Monitor. This way, the UPS will give you time to shut

When a computer just loses power (power failure, coming unplugged, etc) it’s hard on many of the components of the system. It can cause power supply failure over time, motherboard issues, hard drive problems, data loss, and more. It’s a great idea to spend a few bucks at your local electronics retailer or online for a good UPS.

Lightning Storms

In all honesty, the best thing to do if you are near the computers and you know a lightning storm is approaching, is to unplug the power, and any powered devices from your computer. This includes phone lines, network cables and printers. If you have ensured there is no power to any of these devices, they could remain plugged into the PC.

If lightning sends a surge into your home through phone lines, and your DSL modem is plugged into the phone line, it could fry the modem, send the surge on to your network switch/router and then to your computer. It’s important to protect your equipment. The only fool proof way is to make sure everything is unplugged from every source of power.

More Information on Surge Protection:

http://www.howstuffworks.com/surge-protector.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surge_protector

More Information on Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS)

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/question28.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uninterruptible_power_supply