The majority of people buy a computer system, plug it in, and then forget about it until something goes wrong. Regular preventative maintenance can help you to lower costs by extending the operating life of your computer and by identifying small problems before they evolve into something critical, and expensive to fix. In the same way that you put your car in for a service, your computer system can also be serviced to keep it in good working order. There are a number of checks which should be performed regularly. Some of which include:

• Defragmenting your hard drive.
• Removing dust from fans, vents, heat sinks and system boards.
• Checking that the running environment is suitable.
• Checking of event logs for warnings or critical errors.
• Running a disk health check.
• Maintaining good anti-virus, anti-spyware and firewall software.
• Keeping your computer system up to date with critical patches.

Let me give you a real life example of how preventative maintenance can actually save you money.

While performing a preventative maintenance check on a clientÂ’s computer, one of the tests came back with a red flag in relation to disk health. A quick software check confirmed that the hard disk had a number of bad sectors, something which usually happens prior to a hard drive becoming totally corrupt and unusable. The drive was replaced and the computer system is still running to this day.

Now letÂ’s assume that this problem was not identified while the data was still ok, and that the hard disk actually crashed, causing the computer system to become unusable.

This example can be applied to a number of common problems such as virus infection or systems failing due to overheating, but the underlying message is still the same.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

If you would like any further information about preventative maintenance or would like to schedule a check of your equipment then please contact us.