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The Benefits of Preventative Maintenance
in a Small Business Environment
Many small businesses don't check on whether their backups have been occurring until 10 minutes after system failure.
That's 10 minutes too late.
It's very easy to replace a CPU fan before it stops and it's easy to detect that it is about to do so.
It's also very easy to replace the fan after the CPU has burned up but much more costly and the system remains down much longer as the CPU then requires replacement as well.
There is a very direct inverse relationship between electronic components and their running temperatures.
As temperatures increase, life expectancy decreases.
The breakdown of the integrity of files on your hard drive can occur for a variety of reasons including inappropriate shutdowns (due to system freezes, etc.)
These files may be repairable if measures are taken to do so before complete operating system failure occurs.
Fragmentation of your hard drive develops over a period of time and occasional defragmenting (putting all the pieces of a file together in one place for quicker access) can improve system performance. Even the registry can be defragmented.
Sometimes the operating system's registry, composed of a few critical configuration files, becomes corrupted.
It is a simple task to restore a backup of a prior registry if one was created and, further, this task can be performed remotely.
Often, a computer's poor performance is simply due to excessive strain on limited resources.
The problem can be attacked from 2 different angles:
(1) increase supply: add memory (not hard drive space)
This can be diagnosed remotely although installation requires onsite service.
(2) decrease demand: disable unnecessary startup programs
This can be rectified remotely and does not require end user participation.
Viruses, Trojans, Worms, Ad-ware, Spyware, Hackers and Security Vulnerabilities of all kinds both on the local computer and on the network require due diligence to prevent them from breaking in and raising havoc with your systems.
Many techniques exist for checking for and eliminating unwanted files and configuration settings that expose systems to loss of private information and cause system crashes and slowdowns.
Many of these techniques can be administered remotely, especially if the target PC has broadband internet access.
Our own in-house systems have been kept up and running for years with only minor interruption.
This is because we exercise, on our own systems, all of the same preventative techniques we've described here.
Occasionally an unforeseen problem will occur and this may require onsite service of some form or other, especially those problems requiring hardware installation or diagnostics.
For a reasonable upfront investment, you can have peace of mind that your networked PC's are being looked after just as though they belonged to some technical support company.
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