PC World had some interesting IT myths they wanted to bust. They were interesting enough to reblog here:

Magnets can erase your data: The only magnets powerful enough to scrub data from a disk drive platter are laboratory degaussers or those used by government agencies to wipe bits off media. “In the real world, people are not losing data from magnets,” says Bill Rudock, a tech-support engineer with hard-drive maker Seagate. “In every disk,” notes Rudock, “there’s one heck of a magnet that swings the head.” Want to erase data from a hard drive you plan to toss? Don’t bother with a magnet. Overwrite the data that is stored on the media instead.

Cell phones can bring down a plane: “I’ve never experienced a navigational problem that could be traced to a cell phone,” says one veteran pilot who didn’t want his identity revealed. “From everything I’ve read, cell phones and most avionics shouldn’t conflict. So why do flight attendants make you put away your gear before takeoffs and landings? “That’s more for making sure [we] have people’s attention and for [individual] safety,” he says. “If I have to hit the brakes and abort a takeoff, I don’t want a laptop flying across the cabin.”

You must eject the USB device before unplugging it: When you unplug a USB device without first “stopping” it in Windows (accomplished by clicking the Remove Hardware icon in the taskbar), your PC makes a bing-bong sound and usually pops up a message scolding you for the move or warning that what you just did can delete data saved on USB storage devices or damage hardware. We’re cautious about unplugging a device while it’s still writing data (an action USB flash-drive makers always warn against) because doing so can cause major damage. Case in point: One PC World editor unplugged an external USB hard drive that was doing some activity in the background; he lost all his data and damaged the drive itself. If you wait until the device stops writing data and then pull the drive out, you’re unlikely to experience serious problems. Although Windows takes you to task for such rashness, even Microsoft downplays the peril. The company told us that any damage will “depend on the USB device, but in general [unplugging a USB peripheral] shouldn’t affect the system.”

You must shut down Windows before shutting down your PC: Don’t touch that switch! According to Microsoft, if you turn off your PC without first shutting down Windows, your hard drive could become more fragmented, files could become corrupted, and you could lose data. Maybe Microsoft’s warning holds some water, but we wouldn’t worry about straining the system or harming Windows. We ran 30 iterations of an informal test, turning off a pair of systems running Windows XP without first shutting down Windows. Each time we left documents open in Word, Outlook, and Quicken. And we left our Internet connection up and running. After we turned each PC back on, we ran Symantec’s Norton Disk Doctor and the Windows disk checker to see if the hard drive had suffered any ill effects. We reopened the applications that we had left running and reconnected to the Internet. Problems? Disk Doctor found no disk errors, and our files were intact–at least up to the last time they were saved, but not always to the point of the last edit made. Outlook recovered without a glitch, and so did Quicken. (We didn’t check disk fragmentation because some hard-drive experts told us that defragging today’s faster, bigger drives has little to no effect on performance.) If you’re uneasy about just switching off the PC, change the Power Options settings. From the Control Panel, open Power Options, click the Advanced tab, and under ‘Power buttons’ select Hibernate. Now whenever you push the power button, Windows will save itself in its current state. Turn the computer on later, and Windows will pop up, just as you left it, in a lot less time than the system would take to boot.