[Pc_Support] x-ray + laptop

[Austin Denyer (Ozz)]

While on the subject, just the high altitude can lead to increased x-ray
exposure.  Believe it or not, during the course of a 10-hour
trans-atlantic flight you are exposed to the same amount of cosmic
radiation as you would get from a medical x-ray!

I used to fly regulary, and passed through airport x-ray machines
several times a week.  My laptop never suffered any adverse reactions
that I could tell.

Regards,
Ozz.

On Mon, 14 Mar 2005 12:14:31 -0500, "Justin M. Keyes" <m9u35g at gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> Thanks Phil!
> 
> On Fri, 11 Mar 2005 18:35:30 -0500, Phil Barnett <philb at philb.us>
> wrote:
> > On Friday 11 March 2005 04:03 pm, Justin M. Keyes wrote:
> > > Hi guys,
> > >
> > > Is there a significant chance that an airport security x-ray may
> > > corrupt a laptop's hard-drive or anything else?
> > 
> > Probably not. Way back when, they used much stronger magnetic fields
> > to excite the x-ray tube and lots of people lost data on unprotected
> > disks, such as floppy disks and even occasionally a hard drive. But
> > about 20 years ago, they got much more efficient and the fields
> > generated are very very small compared to what it takes to wipe data
> > from a drive.
> > 
> > Technically, we are subject to cosmic forces every day that can
> > cause this kind of damage. Chance change of molecules, cosmic
> > radiation and other low energy phenomena can toggle bits in memory
> > and can change bits in hard drives. For hard drives, we have ECC
> > bits protecting data that decays. Expensive servers also have ECC
> > memory to counter this effect.
> > 
> > It's difficult to say how much this effect has on average use, but
> > chances are very high that at some point a crash has been due to
> > this very low level stuff. Maybe even to someone you know...
> >
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