Many of us make resolutions to take better care of ourselves this time of year – we resolve to eat better, to exercise more, and to stress less. We may resolve to take better care of our homes – replacing the gutters or the roof, making much needed repairs to the exterior, or painting that room that’s been needing it for several years. Prevention, whether to protect ourselves, our homes, or our cars, is essential and worth, as Benjamin Franklin said, “a pound of cure”.
So how about your computer? Are you completing scheduled preventive maintenance to protect your investment – and, more importantly, your data?
Basic preventive maintenance for your computer should include completing data and system backups, external cleaning, analyzing and cleaning up your system registry, verifying antivirus definition updates, completing operating system and software updates, reviewing system logs and identifying/ tagging errors as potential failure points, completing system scans, and cleaning up (and possibly defragmenting) your hard disk drive.
A properly maintained computer, whether it is a PC or a Mac, is a better tool. If your computer is improperly maintained, it can be frustrating to use, a potential hazard to other devices on your network, a breeding ground for infections, an inefficient storage location for your pictures and data files, and a costly tool to get repaired when it prematurely fails – and, of course, it’s going to fail at the most inopportune time.
So take some time during is slow period in the business year to do some preventive maintenance on your system or call a professional to get a tune up – you wouldn’t do less by your vehicle or your own body.