When we finally exit the shop with a huge box in our hands, all we want to do is to go home as fast as possible, plug our freshly bought computer in and experiment with it, right?

This is usually how it goes: people get excited when they buy new stuff. However, the Devil, and more importantly, the laws of Murphy never sleep, therefore when something can go wrong, it will. Here are a few tips to avoid the destruction of our PC before we even take it home.

Yes, that is very easily doable.
First of all, I've mentioned before that the computer contains some moving parts, out of which the HDD (The winchester/disk drive) is the most important. As you could read it in an earlier post, it contains disks that spin very fast with the reader/writer heads flying just a few microns above them. Because of this, any serious vibration caused to the winchester may cause the head to hit the disks inside, causing a microscopic piece to break off. This leads to the slow, but steady process of the physical fragmentation of the HDD, which means that because of the high RPM, the centrifugal force will cause more and more parts to break off of the disk, ergo after a while it will become unstable or even completely faulty. The most dangerous vibrations are caused by railroad crossings, so if we drive home by car, we should pass those with extreme care. Also, remember to never put the PC on a hard surface (car floor) while moving it. Soft pillows are the best!

If the weather is as sunny and warm horrible and cold as it is now, when we bring our pc into the warm house from outside, the humidity will precipitate on the parts of our computer. What does this mean? Well, it is equivalent with a glass of water inside the PC. You would not turn on your computer in this case, right? Neither would we. However, if you just can not wait, you can speed up the process by flowing some tepid (!) air into the PC case through the rear fan grid. I do not recommend this, firstly because everyone can wait fifteen minutes, and secondly, because despite the exclamation mark, there were cases when the user succesfully melted the PC's rear fan.

These rules obviously stand for every occassion where we need to move our PC, so be aware of these two things. Laptops are designed to be carried around, but vibration can still be very devastating to them on the long run.