Preventive Maintenance

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 (normally), you do it so that your engine will last and you won't have car troubles down the road (no pun intended :^) ).
This chapter discusses some of the general concepts regarding preventive maintenance, the different types that are relevant to PCs, and how to set up a preventive maintenance schedule. The schedule can be considered a summary of preventive maintenance activities

Importance of Preventive Maintenance

Preventive maintenance is one of the most ignored aspects of PC ownership, in my opinion. Most people seem to think that the PC doesn't need preventive maintenance, and so you should just use it until it breaks, and then repair or replace it. These people generally find themselves repairing or replacing much sooner than those that take definite steps to avoid difficulties in the first place.

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". It's trite, but it is also true. 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.

·         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.

Automating Preventive Maintenance

There are software-related preventive maintenance activities that can be automated. By using system tools that automatically run programs at a specific time, you can set up your system to perform various software checks and maintenance activities without having to remember to do them yourself. Most modern operating systems either have this capability built-in, or support third-party software packages that will do it for you. Of course, you can't set up your PC to perform hardware-related maintenance (cleaning, adjustments, etc.) automatically.

I personally use the System Agent tool under Windows 95, along with the Norton Program Scheduler. Since I work during the day, I have maintenance routines set to run during the middle of the day when I am not around. Many people run these routines overnight, but I save that time for doing backups when I need to. Here are the activities I have set to run automatically:

• Checking the file system for errors.
• Checking all hard disks for read errors.
• Scanning all hard disks and files for viruses.
• Defragmentation of all hard disk volumes.

Some forms of backup can be automated as well. For example, you can use a program scheduler to automatically duplicate files or directories on a nightly basis. Proper full backups cannot be truly automated because they require the backup media to be changed regularly. However, you can still "semi-automate" them; what I mean by this is that you can start the backup before you go to bed and it will be done in the morning, with basically no intervention required while it is taking place. To do this though, you need backup media large enough to hold everything you are backing up.