Kevin Ackland talking about Computer Health Checks
Why is it so important to give your computer a health check?
This is the single most important thing you can do to save your computer from costly repair bills and potentially a loss of data. Whilst a computer should continue to work without problems it is only sensible to make sure. It’s the one chance you will get to ensure that an expert checks that your system is working fine. Unqualified and inexperienced computer technicians cannot give you the wealth of experience that a professional does.
What happens if you don’t have a health check on your computer?
Whether you have a health check on your computer will depend on your computer expertise. Maybe you could think in terms of what would happen if you never got your car serviced and just drove it into the ground without ever making a check. Unlike a car, there is no oil change but there are so many faults that can be prevented by the computer health check. The health check is preventative; we could discover something that saves disaster from happening. With hardware being more and more reliable computer users are leaving things to chance with the expectation that everything will be fine. There are still many things that can go wrong.
How often should you have a computer health check?
An annual health check is normal unless you have other issues going on with your computer system. The annual health check is recommended because your anti-virus is normally renewed on an annual basis and leaving it longer means that we could miss some important issues.
Why are we giving it away free?
Generally they are not free they would normally attract a cost of around £49. Our own health check is free because we can organise our workshop to do these between our paid work. It also means that we get to see our loyal customers regularly without there being a computer problem to get in the way.
The benefits.
You get an expert to look at your machine not someone that “just knows” about computers. A hard disk that is about to fail often gives “tell tale” signs that disaster is imminent. If a system hard disk completely fills up, the computer system will fail, it’s completely predictable. The health check is proactive and preventative.
What is done on a computer health check?
Our checks ensure that they cover the 3 enemies of a computer which are:
Heat generation
Dust build up
Viruses
We go further by checking aspects of the computer that could cause problems in the future too. The event logs are checked and analysed for “tell tale” signs of trouble ahead, the system, application and security logs are all checked for anything that could give a clue to imminent problems.
The heat generated by a computer can be the cause of crashes and hardware failures so all the fans are checked to see if they are performing properly, the amount of dust building up in the computer is reviewed. The technicians then review the amount of physical RAM compared with the RAM being used under normal load conditions. This is an area where we can discover programs that are being loaded up causing the system to be a great deal slower. It can also be the time when we can discover the third enemy of a computer - VIRUSES.
The anti-virus program is checked to see that it is up to date and the customer is advised on the renewal date. The anti-virus program logs are checked to see if there is any evidence of virus or spyware activity.
In all our technicians are active on your computer for around half an hour and there is absolutely no obligation to have any work done at all.
We keep in touch with you too by contacting you if we need any questions answered and importantly we will always contact you when the system is ready for collection - you will never have to chase us. That is they way we run our repair business and that is the way we run our FREE health checks too.
Read about The history of our FREE computer health check.