It is no secret how important laptops have become in people’s lives. With the advent of the powerful internet, laptops have become an essential part of our life—for work, entertainment and business. People have tons of crucial and sensitive data stored on their laptops. This data could be anything from personal information like emails to business ventures like trade secrets and more. Because of the large amount of importance this data holds for people, it is important to protect it by making sure the laptop itself and its data are safe. Here, you will learn about different ways to do that.
Keep your laptop out of the sun and away from heat sources
Don’t leave your laptop in a parked car. Even if it’s a cloudy day and you think your car won’t get too hot, it can still reach more than 100 °F (38 °C) inside the vehicle. This kind of heat can damage your computer in only an hour! Don’t store your laptop in hot rooms either. Heat is bad for computers – it makes batteries wear out faster, causes hardware to fail more often, and can even melt solder joints on motherboards.
Avoid rough handling, including dropping your laptop
Treat your laptop like an expensive bottle of wine: It should be stored upright. You may be able to get away with leaving your laptop on its side for short periods of time, but it’s best to keep it upright as much as possible. Doing so will protect the hard drive from potential failure due to damage from gravity. It will also help prevent battery leakage (which is far less common than it used to be but can still happen).
In addition, never carry your laptop by gripping just one corner or side of it. Hold it at the base, near where the keyboard starts.
Use a good bag or case
A quality laptop case will protect your gadget from drops and bumps while you’re on the go. If you have a laptop with a 15-inch display or smaller, you’ll have plenty of options — there are dozens of great bags available in that size range. But if you have one of today’s larger 17-inch laptops, your choices are more limited; there simply aren’t a lot of options available. However, you’ll still find a fair number of bags to do the job for you.
Get laptop insurance
Laptop insurance covers your laptop against accidental damage, breakdown, theft and loss. It works in a similar way to home contents insurance – it’s there to cover the cost of replacing your device if it’s stolen or damaged.
As laptops are portable, they are often taken out of the home and used in places where they may be more susceptible to damage (or theft). So laptop insurance can give you peace of mind.
Backup your data
By this point, you should already be backing up all your important files. If you aren’t, do it now — there’s no excuse for not having a backup plan in place.
The most obvious solution is to use an external hard drive and regularly back up your files. However, if you’re looking for something that offers more flexibility and doesn’t require a physical device, cloud storage is the way to go.
There are a ton of options out there — here are some of our favourite services that offer reliable cloud storage solutions:
- iCloud Drive (5 GB free)
- Google Drive (15 GB free)
- Microsoft OneDrive (5 GB free)
- Dropbox (2 GB free)
Always use full disk encryption on your laptop if you’re traveling
It’s the simplest thing you can do, and it’s vastly more secure than using the built-in encryption many operating systems offer. Full disk encryption encrypts all of the data on your hard drive. If someone steals your laptop and tries to access it, they’ll need a password or another key to get in. If you don’t offer them one, they’re out of luck.
The only thing that full disk encryption doesn’t protect against is someone with physical access to your computer who can dump memory contents onto another system before the hard drive has been locked down. This is extremely unlikely to happen, but it’s not impossible. That’s why you should never type your full disk encryption password into any type of software that requires you to enter a password before logging in.
Keep your antivirus software up to date
You may not know it, but there is a constant war raging for your computer. In this war, the winner gets to take control of your machine and use it for their own purposes.
The most common form of attack on your machine is the virus. It can be as innocuous as a pop-up window that offers you the most wonderful thing you have ever seen, or directs you to some website that will cure all your problems — or it could be something that takes over your machine and uses it to attack others.
It’s hard to tell what’s going on behind the scenes when you click on “OK” or “Agree” when prompted by one of these dialogs, but if you’re lucky it will just display a few ads or try to sell you something. If you aren’t lucky, it could take over your computer and use it in an attack against other computers or use it to send spam emails.
To protect yourself, make sure your antivirus software is up to date and that you run regular scans on your computer. You should also make sure your operating system is up to date with all the latest patches from Microsoft Windows or Apple Mac.
In Conclusion
These days, it is not unusual to have a lot of crucial and sensitive data on your laptop. From online banking information to ideas for that novel you are writing in the comforts of your bedroom, laptops nowadays hold a lot. Because said data is so important and valuable, you need to take steps to secure it. Hence, we hope this blog helps you in doing just that.
