We’ve all been there…you are in the middle of a task, you have spent a while working towards completion when suddenly your computer crashes or the company’s IT system suddenly goes into meltdown and all of your progress has fizzled out of sight unless quick, swift and often drastic measures are taken to recover the data. With most companies nowadays still stuck in a more “reactive” mindset when it comes to their IT solutions, there are those select few that share the preferred mindset going forward that a “proactive” approach is much more beneficial in the long run. In other words, take measures to ensure a minimal chance that the system will crash and if it does? Well, you and your company will be in a position of leverage to deal with it accordingly. One such way in which you can take the first step to become proactive is through identification and recognition of why you would be put in a situation of “IT system downtime” in the first place.
Here are the top 3 most common reasons as to why your computer usually crashes and a potential fix for each if the problem persists:
1 – Disk Damage / Corruption
When you buy a computer, in some cases the manufacturer will find that there may have been some defective parts within the computer in terms of hardware, however, they will always replace those parts so that it is a brand new machine regardless. If however the more than unlikely chance a particular disk or memory sector of a computer happens so go bad later on, if system information is stored within it, then there will be a more permanent fault. Now instead of the actual hardware being faulty in these instances, it is the OS that most of the time will cause these faults. A couple of easy ways to prevent this as much as possible from happening, is to either get a monitoring program that can access and regularly check the health of your drives or simply store your computer in a space with a vast amount of room that allows for ventilation circulation. Short life span has a direct correlation with where the machine is stores in some instances.
2 – The Computer, The Computer is ON FIRE!
Okay maybe not on fire, however, it’s common knowledge that all computers will get hot to some extent at some point of use, what isn’t common knowledge however is that this can cause the computer’s processor to overhead and thus become far less efficient in operation. If you start to feel a warm sensation on your legs when using a laptop or are noticing that the fans on your desktop aren’t working like they should, turn off the machine and use any compressed air to blow out any dust that is impeding the fans from doing their jobs. If this doesn’t work or the fan just isn’t working anymore, you can disable the CPU internal cache in the BIOS…in easier terms, the Basic Input & Output System of the computer, is a little chip located on all motherboards, you can access it internally and modify any setup changes that may improve performance.
3 – “That” Virus That Infects Everything
Simple fixes such as having a trusted antivirus program that is up to date and able to complete robust and frequent scans as well as provide on the fly feedback as to website security and potential spam or threats that any link may entail. Unfortunately, this may not be enough or there may at the other end of the spectrum be a severe lack of security. Regardless, if a virus has inhibited your machine to start properly, restart your machine in “safe mode” which will evidently let you run a scan of any threats that have leaked into the system helping you pinpoint any disruption.
So there you have it! Have control over those 3 main recurring problems and you should be able to limit the amount of “downtime” on all computers company wide that is caused by individual factors. If you are able to actively listen as such to people, companies and even different industries, specifically the frequent problems they have been encountering recently, you should be in a good position to adapt to any threats that may surface in the short or long term.