h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

....check the specifications of any new part, check the spec of the machine it is to go into, and never unscrew anything more than you have to inside.

oh, and never touch the circuit boards on a hard drive.

Researcher PSG

And if you drop a screw inside, do *nothing more* till you have found it and removed it. It's too easy to get distracted after you've finished fitting the drive/board you were working on and hit the power switch; it only takes about 1/1000th of a second for a screw shorting the wrong place to kill your motherboard completely.

Don't carry out computer repairs while eating drippy, whippy ice cream - espcially the one with the flake in it.

Use a magnetic screwdriver, that will stop you from dropping screws.

I've been down the upgrade route several times now. For someone who works in IT professionally, I'm a complete dinosaur, and tend to use antiquated equipment until it's absolutely useless for its intended purpose. I've generally found upgrades to be only partially successful. It's rather like having an ever expanding family: after a while you give up on trying to squeeze another kid into the airing cupboard and buy another house instead.

I 'upgraded' not so long back, fitting another disk drive which a friend gave me. Except that this disk drive wasn't compatible with the old disk drive, and I didn't know this until the machine had crashed over and over again and I began to smell a rat. So, my hard-won experience tells me that if you're going to upgrade, *don't* try and operate an old component (like a disk drive or a video card) alongside its new counterpart. Chuck the bloody thing away. Better still, chuck the whole bloody computer away and buy or build a new one.

If you *do* use a magnetic screwdriver, don't lay it down on top of your only working boot floppy. It only takes a couple of seconds to render it unusable. (The floppy, that is, not the screwdriver! )