Computer Preventative Maintenance: A Little Can Go a Long Way

When it comes to computers and networks, a little preventive maintenance can go a long way. There are enough computing pitfalls and potential attacks these days to humble even a veteran computer user. With some practical measures, you can greatly increase the protection of your valuable data and computer assets.

Importance of Preventive Maintenance

Here are some reasons why you should develop a preventive maintenance plan for your PC:

•             Preventive Maintenance Saves Money: I'm sure we've all heard the old adage "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Avoiding problems with your PC will save you money in the long run, compared with laying out cash for new components or repair jobs.

•             Preventive Maintenance Saves Time: Saves time? How can taking two hours a month or whatever to perform maintenance save time? Simple: because it saves you the much bigger hassles of dealing with system failures and data loss. Most preventive maintenance procedures are quite simple compared to troubleshooting and repair procedures--now those can really eat up your time at a fantastic rate.

•             Preventive Maintenance Helps Safeguard Your Data: For most people, the data on the hard disk is more important than the hardware that houses it. Taking steps to protect this data therefore makes sense, and that is what PM is all about.

•             Preventive Maintenance Improves Performance: Some parts of your system will actually degrade in performance over time, and preventive maintenance will help to improve the speed of your system in these respects.

Determining When to Perform Maintenance

Some types of preventive maintenance need to be performed more often than others. The frequency of preventive maintenance depends on the nature of the activity; some things just need to be addressed more often than others. It also depends a lot on what your PC is being used for.

PC maintenance activities are usually specified as time-based, because this is easier (a PC has no odometer) but they should be performed more frequently depending on prevailing conditions. A PC used on the manufacturing floor of a steel mill needs to be cleaned more often than one being used in a hospital. A disk that is doing heavy Internet file transfers needs virus checking much more often than one that is used standalone.

One enemy of preventive maintenance is simply remembering to do. It's one thing to say "I will do it every six months", and even to mean it. But how will you remember when the six months are up? One way to address this problem is through the use of a preventive maintenance schedule, which will remind you of when do perform key maintenance activities on your PC.

What we do in a PMA?

Up to date Internet Protection for Patterns & Signatures – We run an independent internet security suite to ensure your Internet protection software is doing the job.

Retiring Software Applications – There could be software applications on your system which are no longer supported by the vendor and they will hence no longer offer security, bug fix patches or service packs – we potentially flag these situations during a PMA.

Run Application Tools to ensure computer running at peak efficiency - Like almost anything, a computer can and will become sluggish and slow without taking measures to keep it running well. Tools will automatically do disk integrity checks, disk defragmentation, and the removal of temporary files.

Check out integrity of critical modules- RAM, Graphic Card, Motherboard & CPU, and Ensure PSU emitting correct voltages across all rails.

Remove all dust & residual build - on Fans, Add on Cards which can lead poor fan performance (e.g., fan wears out, slows down/stopped by dust and oil). Keep dust out of computer case using Canned Air & Vacuum.