1. Cardinal rule: like any electrical instrument, keep away from water at all times. The thought of Tweeting from your Jacuzzi or blogging from a bubble bath is very sexy, but can result in death by electric shock, or exorbitant laptop repair bills.

2. Despite solid rectangular exterior, laptops should not be mistaken for sturdy props. Avoid using laptop as a weapon, flyswatter, tea tray or sports equipment.

3. Resist the temptation to get creative with radiant laptop warmth. Hot laptop air is not a suitable means of cooking breakfast or drying hands.

4. Don’t forget to pick your laptop up when finished checking email on the tarmac.

5. Keep out of reach of children. Don’t listen to advertisers: the point of buying kiddie laptops is actually to redirect innocent kiddie curiosity away from your baby (baby being laptop).

6. You cannot afford to have both your computer and coffee in the form of rogue portable objects. Since you have chosen a mobile laptop, you must invest in a coffee stabilization mechanism, or secure cup holder, so that the two remain separate at all times.

7. Remember it is not your laptop’s fault if you call up infuriating, rage-inducing content onto the screen. If you see incriminating evidence against yourself or your partner on Facebook do not shoot/punch/throw/smash the messenger. Also, if your laptop is acting up you don’t need to resort to physical violence.

8. When surfing the internet try your best to stay away from content of an adult nature, as it often comes with laptop destroying viruses.

9. Secure laptop in a locked cupboard or safe if planning to get drunk, as altered state of consciousness can encourage behaviour along the lines of some of the points above.

10. Above all, know that laptops and cats are sworn enemies.

These 10 tips will ensure a long and happy future for you and your laptop – follow them for success. Unless you want to break your laptop like this guy. If this advice fails to assist and your laptop ceases to function, a reliable RAID data recovery service can help you out.

The root cause of system downtime or failure is due to hard disk drive failure, so you should be chosing the most reliable drives possible. Hard disk drive manufacturers calculate mean time to failure (MTTF) measurements for their products, but usually do not disclose such information.

In our opinion, Hitachi drives are currently the best on the market. When we tested them for average read speeds, write speeds, burst speeds and random access timing they were head and shoulders above their competitors. However, where they really shine is in their reliability.

Many of their competitors are still fighting ongoing lawsuits, because of the inferior quality or known malfunctions, which were not disclosed to customers. High reliability at Hitachi begins with the design process. As a new disk drive program develops, reliability goals are set, along with access times, data rates, RPM, and cost. Reliability problems and failure modes of past products are studied to help make improvements in the new product.

So which drives to avoid – it is difficult to list every make and model, so we will simply list the drives in manufacturer order, rather than elaborate.

Hitachi – Samsung – IBM – Maxtor – Seagate – Western Digital