Company Busts Dust Before the Dust Can Bust Computer Disks

Jackie Davis said he got tired of rousting field engineers in the middle of the night to try to diagnose--usually fruitlessly--all the “hits” his computer disks were taking.

As far as he was concerned, it happened all too often that one of the 32 disks running off his company’s three mainframe computers would take a hit--develop an error or problem spot--shudder and then gobble up data. Hours would be spent re-entering the information and redoing the customer’s job.

So, following a friend’s advice, Davis called in a dust-buster.

Davis, who is assistant vice president for operations at Management Applied Programming in Los Angeles, soon learned the joys of a super-clean computer room. He started seeing a lot fewer hits on the sensitive computer disks, he said.

But he wasn’t satisfied with just having the floor and sub-flooring cleaned. (Most computer rooms are constructed with a raised floor that accommodates miles of wiring but also allows better control of dirt and air conditioning.) Davis wanted someone who would clean the equipment surfaces in the room, too.

Now, Davis said his company pays $5,000 to $6,000 a year to Advanced Computer Supply in Santa Monica, a company that cleans and seals the cement sub-flooring and then uses a special anti-static method to clean the desks, printers, tape drives--even walls and ceilings in computer rooms.

Now, he said, “I sleep better at night.”

Advanced Computer Supply is the Southland contractor for Data Clean, a New Jersey-based company that specializes in keeping computer rooms spotless. It is, said Advanced Computer founder Mary E. Bozanic, one of the few computer service companies that go above floor level with the cleaning regimen.

Bozanic’s company, which separately sells computer supplies, such as magnetic tapes and printer ribbons, extends its computer room services to post-disaster clean-ups and is preparing emergency kits that will help a company protect its computer equipment from flood, fire or earthquake.

Bozanic said that slowly, data processing managers are learning that keeping dirt under control also helps keep costs down.

But it’s a little more sophisticated than taking a swipe at a desk with a dust rag. Dusting, she explained with a hint of a tut-tut behind her words, moves the motes of dust around--where they can be whisked into a touchy computer disk by a mere sigh of a breeze. Instead, the proper process uses special, chemically treated cloths that absorb the dirt particles.

“It’s never dusting,” she said.