PC Preventive Maintenance

Much as the name implies, preventive maintenance, often abbreviated PM, refers to performing proactive maintenance in order to prevent system problems. This is contrasted to diagnostic or corrective maintenance, which is performed to correct an already-existing problem. Anyone who has ever owned or cared for a car knows all about what preventive maintenance is. After all, you don't change your oil and air filter in response to a problem situation, you do it so that your engine will last and you won't have car troubles down the road.

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.

The interval for preventive maintenance on PCs can be determined based on elapsed time or on usage metrics. This is similar to how your car's oil and filter should be changed "every 3 months or 3,000 miles, whichever comes first". 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 and has no modem or floppy disk.

One enemy of preventive maintenance is simply remembering to do. It's one thing to say "I will clean the read/write heads on my floppy disk 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. Some software preventive maintenance activities can also be automated.

In the long run, preventive maintenance saves time and money, protects your data, improves computer performance, and prolongs computer life. These are accomplished by considering and planning for the risks involved in working with computers (e.g. data loss, hardware failure).

Preventive maintenance can be classified into:

• Mechanical Maintenance
• Electrical Maintenance
• Software or Hard Disk Maintenance

Mechanical Maintenance

General Cleaning

The benefits of cleaning your computer periodically are not limited to merely improving its performance. Regular cleaning is also important for prolonging your computer’s life and enhancing its performance. By removing dirt, dust and other particles that can interfere with connections in computer circuits, the efficiency of your computer is increased, and the chances of overheating lowered.

Generally, your computer should be cleaned every 4-6 months. However, if your computer is used often and operates in a dusty environment, it should be cleaned more frequently, i.e. every 3-4 months. Other factors, including the number of users and whether or not they own pets, also influence the frequency of cleaning.

Choosing a Good Location for Your Computer

Ensure that the computer is placed in an area with good ventilation such that the heat generated by the microprocessor, motherboard, and other devices is dissipated. In addition, books and other objects should not be placed on top of the monitor case, as this would block excess heat from escaping from the ventilation slots. This could cause colour shifting, screen flicker, and failure.

Electrical Maintenance

It describes the electrical aspect of maintenance, specifically surge protection, which involves safeguarding computer components such as the monitor, hard drive, and processor from voltage variations, i.e. spikes and surges. Spikes occur when lightning strikes a transformer, whereas surges occur when high-powered electrical motors are shut off, subsequently releasing extra voltage into the line. During power outages, any unsaved ongoing work is lost. Rural areas, which are more prone to surges, are recommended to make use of an interruptible power supply (UPS) to avert this problem.

Software or Hard Disk Maintenance

Antivirus Software

Antivirus software searches your computer for viruses, “A program or piece of code that is loaded onto your computer without your knowledge and runs against your wishes…A simple virus that can make a copy of it over and over again is relatively easy to produce. Even such a simple virus is dangerous because it will quickly use all available memory and bring the system to a halt.”

Defragmenting

Files are saved in sectors. As more and more files are saved on and deleted from your computer, the files can get more and more cluttered (depending on the file system used by the operating system), with their fragments scattered across the hard drive in different sectors. To access the files, the hard drive must search for and combine these file components stored in different sections, an operation which slows down file access times. Defragmenting arranges these scattered files in a more organized, continuous manner, thereby reducing the time needed by the computer to access a particular file. In addition to speeding up file access times, the life of the hard drive is extended, since actual mechanical movement is reduced. This should be done approximately once a month. Defragmenting requirements vary from OS to OS since different file systems are used.

Windows is prone to fragmentation since it tries to put file fragments as close to the beginning of the hard drive as it can. By revising these files and increasing or decreasing their size, the clutter worsens, delaying file access times further. A defragmenting tool is bundled with Windows.

PC Medic

It emphasizes the importance of removing unused and unnecessary programs from your hard disk. By removing files you don’t need, such as files in the trash or recycle bin, temporary files, and cached web pages you don’t use, you are freeing up space for programs you will actually use.

Uninstalling should be done properly, e.g. using Add / Remove Program, and not simply deleting the folder.

References

 http://www.reciclemos.net/docs/pdfs/Preventive%20Maintenance_PDF.pdf

 http://www.pcguide.com/care/pm.htm