INTRODUCTION

If you are spending any significant amount of time looking around this site, you probably care about your PC and your data. You want your system to let you work--and play--efficiently, and with a minimum of hassle. Taking care of your system, and establishing a preventive maintenance routine, are critical to ensuring that you have a reliable system that performs at top efficiency year after year.

This Guide is dedicated to exploring the various ways that the system can be maintained and cared for, to ensure that it gives you years of trouble-free service. This includes topics such as data backup, hardware maintenance and cleaning, environmental concerns and the like.

I am continually amazed at how little attention preventive maintenance and system care get from most PC users. It seems that people think computers don't require any maintenance at all! No right-minded person would go for years without changing their car's oil, or replacing the air filter on their furnace, yet I routinely see:

PCs that have never been cleaned, for years at a time.
Systems that are not routinely checked for viruses and file system corruption.
People who never back up their data! How can it be that so many people still have not learned from so many others' mistakes?
Users who know a lot about how to fix problems and troubleshoot, but not much about how to prevent them in the first place.
In some cases, these situations arise because people don't know what they need to do, or how to do it. This is the reason that I wrote this Guide. I am hopeful that those of you reading this will take system care and preventive maintenance seriously. If you didn't know it was important before, or weren't sure what to do, this Guide will help. Now you have no excuse.

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

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

Care Factors

General System Care Factors:
There are many aspects to system care and maintenance that affect the system as a whole, or every component in the system, as opposed to being specific to a particular component. These factors are discussed in this section

Environmental Care Factors:
In the last few decades we all have become much more tuned into our external environment and how it affects us. Well, it affects your PC as well. We're much more important than PCs of course, but as it happens, many of the things that make humans sick or uncomfortable, have a similar impact on computers. This section takes a look at these issues

Cooling and Ventilation Care Factors:
As mentioned in many other places on this site, keeping your system cool is very important. A cool system runs more reliably and lasts longer than one that runs hot. Overheating of the internal components can lead to data loss or even damage to your equipment. In recent years, as processors in particular have gotten faster and hotter, the subject of cooling has become more important than ever.

This section takes a look at various issues related to system cooling. This includes referral to areas in the Reference volume where particular cooling mechanisms for different components are discussed in more detail.

Power Care Factors:
Many issues with PCs are ultimately related to power problems. Providing a good, reliable power source to your PC is one essential aspect of system care. In fact, the quality of the power used to run your PC is so important that I have a section of the Reference Guide dedicated to it; I won't repeat all of that information here. I will talk about how to avoid power problems, as well as energy conservation and system life issues related to the use of power.

System Care: Protecting Your PC

System Care: Protecting Your PC:

                                            One very important category of preventive maintenance is caring for your system hardware. This includes maintaining the various components that make up your PC, along with looking at overall factors that affect the system as a whole. This chapter takes a detailed look at what you can do to keep your system, components and media operating at peak efficiency.

Data Loss and Virus Prevention

Data Loss and Virus Prevention:
                                          The hardware in your system will work better and more reliably, and last longer, if it is maintained regularly according to the directions I outline in this Guide. But ultimately you can "get away with" poor preventive maintenance practices in most cases; at worst your hardware will fail and you will have to replace it. Expensive, but not the end of the world, usually. However, there is one thing that if lost, cannot be readily replaced: your data.

Data can never be properly replaced; it can only be protected against loss. This is why it is so critical that you take positive, proactive steps to reduce your chances of catastrophic data loss. This chapter examines the risks to data, and how to prevent, detect and correct problems that may threaten it. This includes a look at viruses, what they are, and how to deal with them.

Virus Detection and Protection:
                                           There was a time when you only had to worry about you (and your family) screwing up your own PC. Now you have to worry about complete strangers doing it for you. :^) Due to the nature of how software works, it is possible to write programs that can modify or create other programs--a compiler is one example. It is also easy to duplicate a piece of code and write it to various locations on a hard disk. It didn't take very long for some ingenious--but perhaps diabolical--hackers to figure out that they could write pieces of software that would do these things and more, without the user's knowledge or consent, and the virus "industry" was born.

While viruses have been around almost as long as the PC, they have only recently, within the last few years, changed from minor inconvenience to serious menace. There are several reasons why they are now much more of a problem: many more computers are in use, and there are many more ways of sharing information between them. Advances such as the Internet have made it possible for computer viruses to spread much more quickly than ever before, and more computer users in general--especially those that don't understand what viruses are--have given virus writers a much richer set of targets.

Viruses are a fascinating and involved topic, and one that is basically an entire subject unto itself. In this section I take a basic look at viruses, what they are, where they come from, how they spread and how to protect yourself from them. For much more information I would suggest that you consult this comp.virus FAQ page, which covers the subject in much more detail.

Backups & Disaster Recovery

What To Back Up:
                                        To ensure that your backups are performed properly, in a way that ensures that you are protected without taking so much of your time that they become a chore, you must determine what files to back up and how often to back them up. Some files will need to be backed up more often than others. This section takes a look at what files you will want to include in your backup routine, and also the ones you will usually want to exclude.

How To Back Up:
                                       While backing up your data is in some ways a simple matter--"just do it!"--there are in fact some special techniques that can come into play to make backups more effective and less of a hassle. This section takes a look at specific techniques and considerations for performing backups, some of which you might not think of. This includes a discussion of backup timing, scheduling, media storage, and how to ensure that your backups work, and will protect you in the event that you need them.

Boot Disks:
                                       A very important, but separate, part of your backup strategy should be the creation and maintenance of boot disks. These disks are used in the event of an emergency with your system (they are in fact sometimes called emergency boot disks). They are designed to enable you to quickly and easily correct large-scale software and operating system problems with your PC, and to allow you to reconfigure or update your system without being totally dependent on the contents of your hard disk.

This section discusses boot disks and how they work, and provides details on how to make and use them effectively.

Disaster Recovery:

                                      Disaster recovery refers to the process of restoring a system after a "disaster". There are many different definitions of what a "disaster" is, but for our purposes this simply refers to any situation where you need to recreate a system after a hard disk failure.

Note: I am referring to recovery here from the loss of an entire system; if you need to restore just a file or group of files, simply run your backup software's restore facility, select the file(s) to be restored, and follow the directions.


Depending on how you did your backups and what software you used, recovery can be very simple or a great deal of work. This section takes a look at recovery procedures in some detail. (You may also change your mind about what type of backup methodology you want to use, based on what you read here.)