The ultimate PC preventive maintenance checklist potx

You can save yourself a lot of support headaches if you follow some best practices and take pre￾emptive measures to prevent equipment failure, performance degradation, and system problems.

Here’s a checklist of 50 key tasks you can perform to keep your PCs optimized and healthy.

Develop and deploy a client management policy. To avoid surprises for your users and your

support staff, make sure that everyone understands what’s expected of the IT department and

end users. This should disclose all of the performance tasks that IT staff will execute and the

protocol that users should follow to make sure operational objectives are met.

Use the Disk Cleanup Tool automatically on client systems. Running this tool with predeter￾mined options can keep systems optimized by emptying the Recycle Bin, Office Setup Files,

Downloaded Program Files, Temporary Internet Files, Old Chkdsk Files, Temporary Files,

Temporary Offline Files, Offline Files, and other items. You can run the tool in the command line

as Cleanmgr.exe with passed options. A nice overview of the options to run Cleanmgr.exe is

available in Microsoft Knowledge Base article 315246. You can also make this a scheduled task

and automate the process to ensure regular execution.

Defragment hard drives regularly. Disk fragmentation, especially on intensively used systems,

will surely degrade performance over time. Be careful, however, about running disk defragmenta￾tion when large files are open. For example, if a transactional database (SQL or MSDE) is run￾ning, defragmentation tools can’t exclusively access all or parts of these types of files to defrag￾ment the disk. If there is a service that you can stop to bring this part of the system to a zero￾transaction state, you will be able to defragment the drive much more effectively. This is a good

task to automate by using a third-party tool like Diskeeper.

Periodically remove Windows XP pre-fetch files. Consider making a scheduled task to clean

out all pre-fetch files in Windows XP systems to increase performance. These files can become

numerous and large, and their benefits are disputable. These files are kept in the

\windows\prefetch directory of default installations and have a .pf extension.

Disable CD-ROM autorun. CD-ROM autorun can circumvent security measures as well as be an

annoyance. The process is outlined in Microsoft Knowledge Base article 126025.

Keep firmware up to date. Firmware updates can keep your system and subsystems current for

the best performance. Be sure to test the functionality for your infrastructure before deploying

firmware updates. Keep a revision of the firmware distributions you are using or have used in the

past; you may need that archived version again.

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The ultimate PC preventive maintenance checklist

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