Health and Safety

To ensure the safety and wellbeing of yourself and others it is essential that you follow health and safety guidelines. These guide lines are there to ensure that all possible precautions are taken to prevent accidents and in the case of accidents, the best possible course of action is taken.

Faulty equipment must be reported firstly so that action can be taken to repair or replace the item as quickly as possible and secondly to prevent injury of further damage cause by the initial fault

In the event of a fire you are under no obligation to try and tackle the fire but instead you should immediately inform those in your immediate surroundings and proceed to the nearest fire alarm (the location of which you should know) unless doing so would put yourself in unnecessary danger. Once the alarm has been sounded you should make your way to a predetermined evacuation point located at a safe distance from the building. If you attempt to put out the fire it is important that you do not use water fire extinguisher near electrical equipment due to the risk of electrocution, the ideal type to use would be a gas based one such as CO₂ or halon but powder based types and foam based types are also suitable as the foam is non conductive.

Computing health and safety

The correct and appropriate use of computer equipment is also a factor of health and safety as incorrect use of equipment may cause damage to the equipment or injury to the user. Possibly the most common form of injury sustain when using a computer is from bad posture, when seated at the computer you should try to maintain good posture and ensure the seat provides you with good support.

For switching your computer on first switch on power from the mains and check power cabling, after this you should switch on the computer using the correct start up procedure for you make and model of computer. Once this has been done the computer will start to boot up, booting up (from the term bootstrap loader) is the procedure where initial power to the computer will cause the computer to start a basic program that searches your computer for instructions on which OS to load. The OS chosen will then be initiated and will load all software needed for the use of the computer. When you have finished using the computer use the shut down command native to your OS and wait until the computer either switches itself off or comes to a stage where it is safe for you to switch it off, it is then safe to remove mains power.

Data storage should also be checked regularly as many magnetic storage devices become corrupt over time, tape drives and floppy disks are the worst for this as they are more exposed to magnetic field which may cause the small changes in flux on the disk (used to store binary data) to become unreadable over time. HDDs (Hard Disk Drive) are less prone to failure but are by no means invulnerable to corruption. Also data is added to the disk in such a manner that in time data which should be stored consecutively is spread out over the disk, this process is called fragmentation and may cause a slowing of computer performance especially during playback of large information heavy files such as video. To combat this all OS provide a defragmentation program that will reorder data on the disk. As a note you should NOT defrag your disk regularly, the benefits are usually minimal compared to the reduction in disk life.