With temperatures heating up and summer around the corner now’s the perfect time for computer tips and good computer advice to keep your laptop (and you!) cool and calm and happy.

1) Treat your laptop like a cherished pet. NEVER leave your laptop in your car during the heat of summer. Your laptop can suffer permanent damage from excessive exposure to heat.

2) Don’t treat your laptop like a desktop. A laptop was not designed to run constantly all day long. Heat buildup almost always occurs which will at the very least slow down your laptop and at worst strain your laptop’s fans which will force them to fail before their time leading to almost irrecoverable and constant internal heat failure.

3) No food and drinks allowed. More often than I care to recall, I’ve seen laptop keyboards permanently damaged thanks to spilled beverages like coffee or tea or the beverage of your choice. In some cases the liquid seeps into the motherboard killing your laptop right then and there. The worst case of this I saw was with a Mac Powerbook. A full cup of coffee spilled all over the laptop. The damage was fatal. That client just kissed $2,000 goodbye. Snacks aren’t as bad but crumbs can fall into the keyboard making typing difficult.

4) Don’t force the issue. Laptop screens are very delicate and are prone to cracking leading to the liquid that fires the display to leak. If that happens it could be impossible to see anything on your laptop even if it seems to boot normally. The repair or replacement of a laptop screen can be quite expensive. Don’t force the lid closed. Don’t push down hard on your laptop to close it and, I know I shouldn’t need to say this, don’t sit on your laptop.

Common sense and all good care will make sure your laptop is happy and healthy for years to come.

You already know that looking for a date or, ah, some companionship on Craig’s List could get you a breathtaking array of diseases and quite possibly killed. You just don’t know who’s lurking on Craig’s List. They can be a psychotic serial killer, a disease-infested human petrie dish or, perhaps even worst of all, an incompetent computer guy.

A new client in Sayreville called me in a panic. Her computer was dead — killed by the hands of an incompetent computer repair person who advertised his services on Craig’s List.

I arrived at the crime scene and immediately began my investigation. An autopsy revealed the cause of death as a completely failed hard drive. Not even my own power supply got a heart beat. This hard drive was dead. And it took all of this poor soul’s files with it.

I relayed this news to the client. Without a single thread of exageration let me tell you that the poor women broke down and started to cry. The whole water works was turned on.

The worst part is that the poor woman recruited this Craig’s List Killer to help her because her computer was infected with spyware.

So how does somebody kill a computer when all he’s trying to do is remove an infection?

After all, spyware is a software problem. A dead hard drive is a hardware problem. So how is this possible?

Anything’s possible when you don’t know what you’re doing.

Friends and neighbors, you wouldn’t think of looking for your next doctor, attorney or acountant on Craig’s List so why would you turn to Craig’s List for a computer professional?

The moral of the story: Turn to a trusted IT professional with all your tech support needs.

As thing stand now the woman faces a data recovery bill ranging anywhere from $250 to $2,500 to get her files back.

For a pittance of $219 (parts and labor) I got her computer back to work with a new hard drive with 600% more storage than before.

As a word of parting advice for her — and for you — I told her to get Carbonite and put all her worries of data loss behind her forever.

A word to the wise is sufficient, right?