5 THINGS TO CHECK ON YOUR COMPUTERS BEFORE THE START OF THE NEW YEAR

Wanting to start the new year right? Start with your most precious piece of office equipment – your computer.

Below are 5 things you must habitually do AT LEAST ONCE – at the start of the year.

Clean the fans

Computers have fans to keep them cool.  These fans suck in dust.  That dust collects on things inside the computer.  Over time, it can build up.  Computers need to be cleaned out periodically to keep them from running too hot.  When computers get too hot, they start doing things like shutting down randomly, failing, not turning on correctly, etc. A way to keep this from happening is to clean them out on a regular basis.  Your environment will dictate how often that needs to happen.

Get a UPS

Do you work in an area where power constantly fluctuates? Computers are designed to run on a very specific amount of power that is clean and stable.  They do this through their own internal power supply, converting the power from the wall to the consistent power that a computer needs to operate.  When that power flickers, the computer is not happy.  It can have effects such as blown capacitors, failing power supplies, bad memory, data loss on the hard drive, you name it.  At the end of the day, it can just create a huge headache.

There is a simple solution to this problem. Get an Uninterruptible Power Supply.  It’s like your standard power strip with a big battery in it.  It serves two functions:  1) Regulate power coming to your computer to what it wants to see all the time, regardless of what the wall is providing, and 2) Give you enough time to save your work and shutdown your computer in the event of a total power failure.UPSes are not very expensive and can save you hours or days of headaches getting your computer repaired because of bad power.  Remember that they should be replaced every 2-3 years.

Check on your Antivirus Subscription

The start of the year would be a good time to review the effectivity of your antivirus. Make sure yours is updated, lest you regret losing all your data to one simple virus of malware.

Check if your RAM needs an upgrade

While on your holiday vacation, why not take some time out to check if your computer memory is already running low? Nothing is more annoying than finding your unit freezing or malfunctioning simply because your RAM has ran out.

Backup for data

Too basic to merit a spot on this list? You’ll be surprised – not everyone backs up their data on a regular basis, so are you one of these negligent individuals? Backing up should be as ingrained in people as putting gas in your car.  Believe it or not, too often, problems happen because what people took for granted, like automatic back-up, can fail.  Make sure this action of your is actually working.

Backups are a critical thing, because hard drives fail, sometimes without warning.  Make sure you have backups of your critical files. Also, make sure you TEST your backups.  Check them out – make sure they actually contain the data they should.  Backups are not fire-and-forget; they need to be checked.