Computer Preventive Maintenance: Ignorance vs Neglect (Part 2 of 3)

Two Main Causes of Computer Malfunctions

(Cont from Part 1) If you read Part 1 of this article, you can see, I pretty much pointed out the 2 main causes of most computers malfunctions, “ignorance” and “neglect”. To make matters even worse, our weakened economy is exploiting these problems by making people run their computers into the ground by putting off repairs until the problem gets critical. Part of this makes no sense to me. I would expect that when money is needed for more important things, that people would take better care of what they already have, but now people end up with higher repair bills, not just because they put off repairs, but because of neglecting preventive maintenance.

I can’t say I’m sorry for my tough love approach to computer care, because if you think you hate computer problems, many computer repair Technicians hate them even more, especially when most problems are preventable! Computers have been around long enough, that we should know better by now.

If you are just learning, there are plenty of YouTube How-To videos and other free resources about preventive computer maintenance. One thing I can show you now is how to check your Event Viewer logs. The Event Viewer can reveal specific problem areas with your hardware or software that you can copy & paste into Google to search for a solution. Sometimes, the fix might something as simple as updating an application or a driver. A more serious error might be bad blocks (clusters) on you hard drive which might be corrected by running the built-in Windows chkdsk utility. If they aren’t corrected, you should back-up your data immediately and schedule the hard drive to be replaced. In most cases if you catch it early enough, your drive can be force-cloned to a new drive and retain all your customizations, programs, and data. Otherwise, if you wait until it is too late, you will still need a new hard drive, but you may lose your data. You’ll also have some follow-on work to do such as reinstalling your programs and printer software. Below is a screenshot and video of a Windows 7 Event Viewer.