Preventative Maintenance or Reactionary?

Discussion in 'Training & Development' started by Arroryn, Jan 2, 2008.

  1. Arroryn

    Arroryn we're all dooooooomed Moderator

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    Good afternoon everyone :)

    In the lull between Christmas and New Year, I was musing on how to make things a little easier on First Line here.

    We have around 300 users in 4 offices.

    I was thinking of discussing with HR getting a holiday schedule, and whenever people are off, logging onto their PC to run defrags, and just do a 'healthcheck' to make sure they keep running a-ok.

    Does anyone already have a similar policy in place, where this is part of their working practise? If so, do you have a basis for comparison, on how effective it is compared to just waiting for problems to arise?

    Basically, would it be worth the time and effort to implement?
     
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  2. Fergal1982

    Fergal1982 Petabyte Poster

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    We never did that when I worked frontline, but I cant see it being a bad thing. If your front-liners have the time to spare to do it, why not. Just make sure all the users are aware of the policy.

    Ultimately though, you are paying staff to do work, if they have the time to twiddle their thumbs, give them something else to do. This would be as good as any.
     
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  3. Sparky
    Highly Decorated Member Award 500 Likes Award

    Sparky Zettabyte Poster Moderator

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    Chances are you will end up having to go into work over the holiday period to go around all the PCs running defrag etc.

    Perhaps decide what maintenance you would like to do on each PC and find out a method to do this either though group policy or batch files.

    The basic things you probably want to start with are.
    Windows patches\Service packs (WSUS server)
    Full AV scan
    Spyware scan
    Defrag
    Low disk space.

    There are products which you can buy that will audit PCs on a regular basis and will give you the hardware and software installed. This is handy if you don’t have a corporate build for each PC as users often install all sorts of crap on their PC which can cause the PC to run slow.
     
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  4. Fergal1982

    Fergal1982 Petabyte Poster

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    only if you do it over the christmas/new year holidays. Why cant it just be done whenever the user is on holiday? Their PC is free anyway...
     
    Certifications: ITIL Foundation; MCTS: Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010, Administration
    WIP: None at present
  5. Arroryn

    Arroryn we're all dooooooomed Moderator

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    Yeah that's the main point :tongue

    We already run a full AV scan daily, when the users are scheduled to be on lunch. Definition files are updated overnight, and low disk space isn't really an issue as we use a separate DMS.

    It's mainly the 'tidying' that can't be otherwise done as the user (as PCs are locked down), and just having a shufty as we have (as does everywhere) users that don't report issues as they don't think they're important/IT are busy/what error message/I turned it off and on again, honest!
     
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    WIP: Modern Languages BA
  6. Sparky
    Highly Decorated Member Award 500 Likes Award

    Sparky Zettabyte Poster Moderator

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    Sounds like a plan, if you are going to take the time to sit down every single PC then perhaps tie it in with an audit of the whole network? Plenty of scope to create Visio docs etc. 8)
     
    Certifications: MSc MCSE MCSA:M MCSA:S MCITP:EA MCTS(x5) MS-900 AZ-900 Security+ Network+ A+
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