CompTIA A+® Certification All-In-One For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

1.1. Preventive Maintenance 101

The goal of preventive maintenance is to prevent problems. Repairs — remedial or unscheduled maintenance — are the flip side of the coin. The main reasons to perform preventive maintenance are so that you can

• Save time. Even though it takes time to perform some maintenance tasks, many can be automated (saving time). If a computer is well maintained, you have fewer repairs to make (saving more time), and the user ends up with less downtime (saving user's time).

• Save money by increasing productivity. Time is money. Users with less downtime related to IT activities are more productive. Also, if you're not spending time repairing computers, your time can be devoted to other pursuits that can improve the overall IT infrastructure.

• Protect data. Data is the life of many organizations. A company that experiences a major loss of computerized data has little better than a 40% chance of reopening, better than a 50% chance of going under within two years, and only a 6% chance of recovering and surviving long-term. With these statistics in hand, you can easily see why many companies invest so heavily in backup technologies. In many cases, though, companies do not plan backups, or they forget about the data that resides on desktop computers — even desktop and laptop computers should be protected.

• Improve performance. All computer systems seem to slow down over time, and some simple steps can eliminate these slowdowns.

NOTE

Although most businesses can equate everything ...