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Computer Support Costs Keeping Them Under Control After struggling for weeks, months, or years with an outdated machine, a business owner—or employee—may see a brand new personal computer (PC) as the utmost in speed and stability. Unfortunately, once the computer is personalized with the user’s favorite wallpaper, screensaver, tools, and applications, Home programs, Real audio, that speed and stability tends to evaporate—along with the user’s improved productivity. The end result is usually higher support costs. In fact, studies show that support costs account for between two-thirds and three-fourths of the total cost of PC ownership…and the proportion will only increase as the cost of hardware continues to plummet. So how can business owners control the total cost of PC ownership? The answer is to impose and enforce standards—“best practices”—on all computers and users. The steps outlined below are guidelines for any business, no matter many computers it may have. These steps will greatly reduce computer downtime and support costs. 1. Start with a clean slate. Don’t let users automatically transfer everything from their old workstations to the new ones. Take some time to purge and archive old files. 2. Standardize workstations. Install the same general operating system and software packages on all computers. In fact, to the greatest extent possible, install the same versions of software. 3. Ban all personal software. The problem isn’t just that it takes up space on your systems and slows everything down…or even that workers shouldn’t be using your computers for personal business or entertainment. The fact is, having any software installed on your business’s PC for which you do not have a proper license makes your company and its owners liable for software piracy—and the penalties, both criminal and civil, are severe. In addition, when new software is installed on Windows machines, it may not be compatible with other business related applications causing problems. Its files go into several folders, not all of them obvious. This may lead to registry conflicts or loss of data important to your regular business software. Also the leading cause of Corporate Virus infections is from floppies brought in from home. 4. Install antivirus software. Files, software applications, and e-mails that come from unauthorized sources can do more than take up space. They may contain viruses and other damaging items capable of spreading through an entire PC—or network!—corrupting, erasing or crashing hard drives as they go. To keep your PCs safe from the ever-increasing hordes of viruses, worms, and Trojan horses spread by modern-day vandals, configure your antivirus software to fetch automatic updates at least twice a week. 5. Standardize updates and upgrades. If you install a “fix” or “patch” to one workstation, or buy the latest version of an application for one user, update the software on all PCs. 6. Avoid multimedia and graphics. Graphics, colors, and multimedia use a lot of computing power and memory. You’ll want to avoid them unless your business applications require their regular use. In plain English, that means (among other things) that graphic-intensive wallpaper and screen savers, along with animated cursors or desktop “themes,” belong on home PCs, not in the office. Do Not set those fancy 3D screen saver on the server, the processing time required to flip that 3D image around can slow a server to a crawl. 7. Ban Internet news tickers and radio stations. These Internet broadcasts deliver a double-whammy: Their intensive data streams rob both your local network and the individual workstation of precious bandwidth to the Internet. The can suck all of the bandwidth out of your Internet connection. Instant Messenger programs constantly ping the messenger servers for updates creating extra trafic also. 8. Minimize Windows to maximize performance. Users often find it useful to have multiple applications open at one time, so they can quickly flip from one to the other. In general, this is a good practice…but be aware that application consumes far more graphical memory when its window is open than when it is minimized. So if you are running, say, Microsoft Word, Excel, and a Web browser simultaneously, but only using Excel at the moment, minimize the other two applications’ windows or open Excel full screen. 9. Limit scheduled tasks. It’s good practice to schedule disk utilities to check for disk errors and fragmentation. Just don’t overdo the frequency. Once a week is plenty. 10. Basic Maintenance. Clean out the machines TEMP Files on a regular basis. Every time you open up a program the temp directory is scanned for data. Having a lot of temp files can slow down the way applications run. Look for a folder called TEMP in the C:\ area or the Windows Directory, Open it and delete all files and folders. Run DEFRAG on your machine once a month this repacks the files on your hard drive making the drive access more efficient. Look in MY Computer |Click on the drive, Right click Properties |Tools|Defrag Enforcing these practices isn’t as hard as you might think. Microsoft offers a rich array of deployment and policy enforcement tools for Windows 95, 98,NT, 2000 and XP Workstation. To learn more about implementing these standards talk to your support specialists. |
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