Should I be doing maintenance on my system?
Scheduled maintenance, updates, and backup testing: Like you do with regular patient visits, we believe in a proactive approach to avoid serious problems. Healthy systems are a lot like Healthy smiles!
Why do we recommend maintenance? At DDS Integration we practice what we preach. Maintenance is performed on our computers routinely and this keeps them running great. With your critical data and workflow this is of great benefit for you too. So what exactly gets done during system maintenance?
- Check for hidden viruses and spyware. Antivirus works great and does its job well but none is perfect so it is important to periodically double check.
- Defragment your computers' hard drives. This is like cleaning up your desk. When things get disorganized it takes longer and longer to find them, slowing you down. A computers hard drive functions the same way.
- Perform Software updates (that have probably been annoying you with pop-ups). Every piece of software on your computer constantly wants to update, and on an ongoing basis we advise you to ignore these to keep all computers at a consistent state. However, they are important to do and once we have had a chance to test these updates (because sometimes they break things) on our machines we will do them all at once on your computers. These are very often very important security updates, particularly in the case of Microsfot. Ignoring them altogether leaves you at an increased risk of intrusion.
- Test your backup. Sure the email notifications (you do have this with your backup solution right?) is telling us that the backup is completing successfully, but we feel better if we periodically test it just to be sure.
- Get rid of unneeded startup and background programs. Ever wonder why your not so old computer is slow all of a sudden? Every time you install a program (itunes, Adobe reader, skype, etc...) and often a printer (HP is notorious for this) it puts a startup or background program on your computer that runs all the time. All these programs running unnecessarily in the background use processing power that we would rather you use for a program you actually want to run. Doing this can get rid of a lot of the annoying "Check for Updates" pop-ups too.
- Test battery backups to ensure they are doing their job and have enough life to help you in a power outtage. Hopefully you have these on all your computers, if not at least on the server!
- Check event logs on all computers for errors or problems that could cause serious issues.
- Take care of anything on your To Do List.
These are some of the core recommendations we have for system maintenance, of course this will be customized for your particular system. Just like a healthy smile requires maintenance, so does a healthy computer system!
