2. Get good surge protection with battery backup. Plug your computer case and your monitor into the battery-back up portion – and your docking station if you have a laptop; everything else (including printer) simply receives surge protection. There are three goals for the 5-10 minutes of battery backup: provide you time to save your work; assess if this is just a momentary flicker or a longer outage; and then, for an outage, to turn off your computer.

3. After an outage, wait five minutes before turning back on your computer. If the power grid has problems, they will usually show up within less than 3-4 minutes after power is first restored.

4. Power sag problems can be noticed when your local printer suddenly prints comic-book characters (“@#!l%^”, etc.) in the midst of printing. Beyond brief battery backup, contact the power company or a company like APC to work with you on solution options.

2. VERIFY YOUR ELECTRONIC SETUP

Automation is the name of the game when it comes to preventive computer maintenance for the busy small business owner or nonprofit executive. This is one area where automobiles are playing catch-up. There are three items that you must automate : virus protection, critical software updates and computer firewalls that are either part of the operating systems (such as Windows® XP’s firewall) or part of your anti-virus software.

I recommend getting virus protection software that combines virus and spyware protection at a minimum; add the firewall option if you do not use an operating system with a built-in firewall (such as Windows® XP). Critical updates are just that – software patches rated as “critical” by the vendor; all other patches, enhancements and updates can wait for the end of the year.

3. MONTHLY PREVENTATIVE MAINTENANCE

Once a month, perform two tasks: clean your temporary files and empty your trash/recycle bin (you can do this with the “Disk Cleanup” utility in Windows® XP); and then defragment your computer (run the “Disk Defragmenter” utility in Windows® XP). Think of this as checking your oil, tire pressure, window washer fluid, and cleaning out the kids’ toys in your car.

4. ANNUAL COMPUTER MAINTENANCE

Just like a car needs a tune-up once a year, so too does a computer. There are two parts: electronic and physical.

The electronic tune-up consists of the monthly maintenance plus a scan disk of your hard drives and a manual check of all software for updates. In Windows® XP, utilize the “Check Disk” utility – check both boxes to fix file system errors and scan for bad sectors.

For each software package such as Adobe® Reader or Microsoft® Office, check for updates using their built-in method or via their support/downloads website sections. Although you may not be required to do so, I recommend restarting your computer after each different software package has been updated. This will allow the various bits of code to properly “register” with the computer and cause any error messages to be isolated to the last update you did (versus just “something”).

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