COMPUTERS N NETWORKING

You may feel healthy…. but you’re sitting in front of a big toxic timebomb when
you compute.

Your computer contains many of the most dangerous chemicals on earth, and they
are building up at a location near you!

Manufacturers have sealed the toxins inside, but the dumping of obsolete PCs over
the years, and crushing them in landfills, will let dangerous substances seep out into
surrounding land, air and water.

In the US, according to the Safety Council, 60 million PCs are already buried in
landfills and 138,000 computers a day will become obsolete – and so ready for dumping
- between 2004 and 2009.

Just in the UK, up to 2 million Pentium PCs are dumped each year.

Also, any disaster is likely to release vast quantities of poisonous material. (One estimate
of 9/11 was that the personal computers destroyed contained 200,000 pounds of lead!)

How much escaped into the outside world? Judging from onsite readings in the
following weeks- a LOT.

A computer is environmentally expensive to make. It will use 10 times
its weight in fossil fuels plus a tonne of purified water.
Polluting substances (at low levels) are also discharged into rivers’
lakes and the air during every stage of manufacture.

However savage competition, increasing repair costs, and regular model upgrading has meant manufacturers have made little effort to recycle, as PC prices – and hence profit margins – have stayed low.

So what poisons are there in your average model? The main ones are:

LEAD

Consumer electronics make up 40% of lead continually dumped (until recently)
into landfills and scrap yards. An average computer uses 4 pounds of Lead,
i.e., 6.2% of the total weight of the PC.

The main uses of Lead in Consumer Electronics are for soldering of printed
circuit boards (PCBs) and other electronic components, as well as glass
panels in computer monitors (cathode ray tubes), to shield you from radiation.
Typically a screen can contain 2 to 5 grams of lead!

Lead is one of the few natural substances not essential to life.
At even very low levels, lead has been shown to cause health problems.

Lead can damage the central and peripheral nervous systems,
blood system and kidneys in humans. It accumulates in the
environment and has serious damaging effects on plants,
animals and microorganisms.
The difficulty with lead is that once it is mined from the
earth, there is no commercially acceptable way to destroy
or make it harmless – you can only try recycling it
The recyclable efficiency of Lead is around a low 5%.

CADMIUM

Cadmium occurs in certain electronic components such as resistors, infrared
detectors, semiconductors, older cathode ray tubes, in batteries and as a plastic stabilizer.
Cadmium is an extremely toxic metal, and may damage human health irreversibly.

Cadmium and cadmium compounds concentrate in the human body, in particular in the kidneys.

Cadmium is absorbed mainly through breathing – very dangerous, (high levels can kill!)
but also enters via food, and can easily accumulate in amounts that cause
symptoms of poisoning.

Again like lead, cadmium has accumulated via the dumping of old
computers, and has become a hazard to us all.

BARIUM

Barium is used in the front panel of a CRT to protect users from radiation.
Barium can be released through the air, water, and soil, and also accumulates
in fish.
Studies have shown that short-term exposure to barium (through ingestion)
has resulted in brain swelling, muscle weakness, and damage to the heart,
liver, and spleen.

MERCURY

22 % of the yearly world consumption of mercury is used in electrical and electronic equipment.
In PCs you’ll find mercury in PWBs, batteries and the newer liquid crystal LCD flat screens
that are replacing the older bulkier monitors, with their cathode ray tubes, ( whose screens contained lead!)

Mercury is a powerful poison. Published research has shown that mercury,
even in small amounts, is more toxic than lead, cadmium and even arsenic!
Although mercury is just 0.0022% of the total weight of the computer, it is
a big health hazard.

And we haven’t even touched on other hazardous and polluting substances like Tin, Arsenic, Beryllium,
hexavalent Chromium, Selenium,arsenic,manganese, Silver. Plus stabilisers and additives.

Polybrominated flame retardants used on cables and circuit boards
may damage sexual development and growth, and accumulate in human breast milk

If computer materials are ‘destroyed’ by commercial incineration, hazardous metals
and cancer causing organics like dioxins can be discharged into the air.

Stricter laws are being gradually introduced worldwide controlling
the dumping and recycling of computers, although the present ‘dumping’ of
computer waste by the West on developing countries has
now become a major scandal. We healthy people are making people overseas ill
dismantling our PCs.

The main aim behind PC disposal laws worldwide has been ‘make the polluter pay’,
So manufacturers will be expected to pay the direct costs.

(But don’t be too amazed if you find your new PC suddenly costs $60 more!)

The European Union has led the way with a series of Directives putting strict limits
on the hazardous content of a PC sold in member countries, and how all PCs are disposed
of – sellers will have to take them back and arrange recycling.

The US has so far adopted a more piecemeal approach, although states as far apart as
California and Alaska are enforcing strict controls on dumping and disposal of electronic equipment.

What can YOU do?

• Check your local regulations if you want to dispose of your computing equipment.

• Give your computer away to a registered charity or organisation that can use it. (Make sure it’s in good
  working order before you try this!)

• Use a registered specialist disposal firm to remove and recycle old computers, don’t break the law
  and pollute the environment!

• In future, before you buy a new PC, consider buying a recycled computer, or upgrade your old one.

Plus, have a look at these sites…….

Environmental Protection Agency (US)

http://www.epa.gov/

In UK, Industry Council for Electronic Equipment Recycling (ICER)

http://www.icer.org.uk/

Good luck, and healthy living and computing in 2006 and beyond!

The question is purely academic; anyone with even a modicum of PC knowledge would know that cleaning the PC is a thorough and comprehensive job that requires tools that can do it from the outside as well as internally. Of course, this is not to say that you should be taking a rag to the darn thing literally, but the computer, with all its complicated machinery needs the delicate hands of programmed and targeted software to ensure that the matrix, the system, the OS and all the hardware is running properly.

Many tech experts would akin the computer to the human body, with the processor being the brain of the computer and the ever increasing important power unit being the heart. The memory banks are self-explanatory and everything else is just a system in itself, a self-contained virtual world where we place all our work, our memories, our entertainment and our personal lives into.

If you had a migraine, you would not just get a head massage would you? You would get aspirin, the very medication that needs to sort out the pain receptors in the brain, soothe any swelling and bring blood and the chemical reactions necessary to soothe and relax you.

Cleaning the PC from the inside out is very easy and the brilliant thing about this task is that it is no more a chore than clicking open Windows and using the very tools that have been provided inside for you to clean the PC and make sure it is running in top order. One of these tools is the defragment tool, which can be described as the single most important piece of software in the accessories department of your computer.

What it does is take all the fragmented data that has been blown to pieces due to system crashes and general use, piece them together so that Windows does not have to go through the arduous task of actually finding these file fragments, then piecing them together so that it can be launched. Many of us would have hard disks that are more than 90% fragmented, which means you are twiddling your fingers waiting for your favourite program to launch for no reason at all.

And the thing is, defragmenting is so easy – all you need to do is to leave your computer overnight and soon the magic is done. Gains of more than 50% speed have been reported on normal systems, the sort of speed you expect from the system when you spend your money on it. Another great way to clean your computer is to use a free registry cleaner or a system scanner that is available freely and widely online. It fixes a crucial part of the computer – the registry, and faults within this tiny file has been sourced to massive computer slowdowns, Active X and runtime errors and crashes.

However, apart from cleaning up the software components of your computer, you should also check to see if the insides of your CPU case have been gathering dust from its ventilation system, especially if you have been using the same machine for years on end. Dust particles may be unwittingly introduced through the CPU fan and ventilation vents, and after years of neglect, these dust particles may prove to be detrimental to the health of your hardware. Some have even reported a total system meltdown simply because the insides of their computers had been clogged up with so much dust that the hardware components simply overheated and died.

Cleaning your computer from the inside out is a crucial maintenance matter. If you want to maintain your machine for a considerably long time, try to keep a regular schedule to clean the software components (perhaps once every 3 weeks), and occasionally open up your case (once a year should suffice) to carefully clear any dust particles with a vacuum cleaner. If you’re not keen on the idea of doing the latter yourself, find a computer technician who can help you do so, albeit at a price.