As a child, I was taught the importance of maintaining mechanical equipment and I continue to believe the old adage that an “ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. All machines will perform better and more reliably with proper maintenance; this applies to personal computers.
I was reminded of this parable when a small business client mentioned that a family member’s laptop was not working. I have worked with this client for 20 years and in that time we have never had a problem that resulted in data loss. Even more remarkable is that we have only had three failures of any kind.
So, why did the family member’s laptop fail; lack of maintenance. The problem, a disk failure, could have been prevented or at least anticipated. The result was a great deal of frustration for the user and additional costs to repair the machine versus the cost of maintaining it.
A regular regime of maintenance could have prevented this and other issues. In addition, regular maintenance keeps PCs running faster so they continue to have that new PC feel.