PREVENTIVE AND EFFECTIVE MAINTENANCE FOR YOUR PC AND LAPTOP

Preventive maintenance is the key to obtaining years of trouble-free service from your computer. Laptop systems are especially prone to problems because they are portable and therefore exposed to more problems than desktop systems, which remain in a single location.

All it takes is an accident such as dropping the system onto a hard surface to turn thousands of dollars worth of computer into so much junk. A little care combined with some simple preventive maintenance procedures can reduce problem behavior, data loss, and component failure as well as ensure a longer, trouble-free life for your system. Preventive maintenance also can increase your system's resale value because it will look and run better.

Developing a preventive maintenance program is important to everyone who uses or manages laptops. The two types of preventive maintenance procedures are passive and active. Passive preventive maintenance includes steps you can take to protect a system from the environment, such as using power-protection devices; ensuring a clean, temperature-controlled environment; and preventing excessive vibration. In other words, passive preventive maintenance means treating your system well.An active preventive maintenance program includes procedures that promote a longer, trouble-free life for your laptop. This type of preventive maintenance primarily involves the periodic cleaning of the system and its components. The following sections describe both passive and active preventive maintenance procedures.

Passive preventive maintenance involves taking care of the system by providing the best possible environment—both physical and electrical—for the system. Physical concerns include conditions such as ambient temperature, thermal stress from power cycling, dust and smoke contamination, and disturbances such as shock and vibration. Electrical concerns include items such as static electricity, power-line noise (when the system is plugged into a wall outlet or other external power source), and radio-frequency interference. Each of these environmental concerns is discussed in the following subsections.

Laptop computers are expensive machines built with significantly tighter tolerances than their desktop counterparts. Although most laptops are designed to function reliably in normal environments, it helps to use some common sense when transporting, operating, or otherwise handling a system. If you treat the system as if it were a very expensive piece of precision electronic machinery (which it truly is!), you will greatly minimize the chances of problems occurring.

Instead of telling you what you should do to take care of your system, we can perform a maintenance based on a quarterly basis. Please see our service listings to know more.