I expose the bad advice that wastes your time and money
Magnets zap your data
For venerable floppies, this statement holds true. We placed a 99-cent magnet on a 3.5-inch floppy for a few seconds. The magnet stuck to the disk and ruined its data. Fortunately, most modern storage devices, such as SD and CompactFlash memory cards, are immune to magnetic fields. "There's nothing magnetic in flash memory, so [a magnet] won't do anything," says Bill Frank, executive director of the CompactFlash Association.
The same goes for hard drives. The only magnets powerful enough to scrub data from a drive platter are laboratory degaussers or those used by government agencies to wipe bits off media. "In the real world, people are not losing data from magnets," says Bill Rudock, a tech-support engineer with hard-drive maker Seagate.
Terrible things happen if you turn off your PC without shutting down Windows
Don't touch that switch! According to Microsoft, if you turn off your PC without first shutting down Windows, your hard drive could become more fragmented, files could become corrupted, and you could lose data.Maybe Microsoft's warning holds some water, but we wouldn't worry about straining the system or harming Windows. We ran 30 iterations of an informal test, turning off a pair of systems running Windows XP without first shutting down Windows. Each time we left documents open in Word, Outlook, and Quicken. And we left our Internet connection up and running. After we turned each PC back on, we ran Symantec's Norton Disk Doctor and the Windows disk checker to see if the hard drive had suffered any ill effects. We reopened the applications that we had left running and reconnected to the Internet. Problems? Disk Doctor found no disk errors, and our files were intact--at least up to the last time they were saved, but not always to the point of the last edit made. Outlook recovered without a glitch, and so did QuickenIf you're uneasy about just switching off the PC, change the Power Options settings. From the Control Panel, open Power Options, click the Advanced tab, and under 'Power buttons' select Hibernate. Now whenever you push the power button, Windows will save itself in its current state. Turn the computer on later, and Windows will pop up, just as you left it, in a lot less time than the system would take to boot
Hackers can destroy data on your computer's hard drive
The MyDoom.f worm took a step back into an era where viruses actually attacked data," says Bryson Gordon, a senior manager with McAfee Security. Although viruses and worms that attack files are relatively uncommon, they are nightmare number one for anyone connected to the Internet.
Today's hackers want to hijack systems, not destroy them. Rather than wipe out data, worms and viruses want intact PCs to send spam or to attack Web sites. "Just like a biological virus, if a computer virus kills the host before it propagates, it can't propagate," says Allen Householder, an Internet security analyst with the U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team, which is now part of the Department of Homeland Security.
If you don't 'stop' a USB device before unplugging it from a PC, you'll screw things up
When you unplug a USB device without first "stopping" it in Windows (accomplished by clicking the Remove Hardware icon in the taskbar), your PC makes a bing-bong sound and usually pops up a message scolding you for the move or warning that what you just did can delete data saved on USB storage devices or damage hardware. To see if the task has negative effects, we unplugged and plugged a bunch of USB devices, including a camera, a printer, a USB flash drive, and a scanner, without first "stopping" them in Windows. The only problem was Windows' failure to recognize our USB flash drive after we had unplugged it and then immediately plugged it in again. If that happens to you, wait a few seconds between unplugging and plugging. If that doesn't work, reboot Windows. And if that doesn't work, run the Add Hardware wizard from the Control Panel to make Windows "see" the USB device
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