PC health check and preventative maintenance

[bareedon]

Hi

We have about 8000 PCs most of them in critical ears (hospital) our plan to implement a PC health check and preventative maintenance,

The idea to divide this project for two parts first will cover the critical PCs every three months and the second will cover the rest of the PCs every 6 months.

This project including PC, Printers and Fax's...

Looking for any new and good idea helping in this matter

Thanks in advance..

\Regards

 

[Lemon13]

did u consider using wmi scripts?

have a look

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/learnmore/tulloch_pc_health.mspx

 

[kmcferrin]

I wouldn't bother doing it by hand. As someone mentioned, you can use WMI scripts to do a lot of the checking. If you're buying HP/Compaq business class PCs, they usually come with an Insight Management agent that can be used for health and well-being monitoring. Then all you have to do is set up an Insight Manager server and let it tell you when there are issues with the PCs.

Barring that, there are a slew of applications specifically written to do just this. Landesk used to be one, Altiris is pretty good too. I know that at first it may seem expensive to license software that does this, but when you add up all the time that you'll spend tracking down PCs and performing diagnostics on them every 3 months it will be well worth it.

You can get applications that not only do health and well-being checks, but also software inventory to monitor license compliance, hardware inventory, etc. But the biggest benefit is that your information will be current instead of (possibly) 3 months old. With some of them you can probably do some limited monitoring of printers and such too.

The only thing that a physical check is going to get you is an opportunity to blow out the dust bunnies. Frankly, I'd rather my people spend their time fixing things that need fixed instead of trying to prevent the unpreventable (hard disk failure, fan failure, etc).

 

[bareedon]

Thank you for your nice reply, I forgot to say that This preventative maintenance include also printers, fax's, EMBOSSING Machines, Scanners and ADDRESSOGRAPH.So we need to visit the site any way...

\Regards

 

[nmsexperts]

Sounds like you may be creating an I/T service that will be billed back to your customers. I would consider purchasing a tool that is multi-protocol and agentless. The multi-protocol will ensure multi-vendor/technology access. WMI is an awesome tool if all of your clients run some form of MS Windows. Given the size of your operation, and potentially the critical nature of the device, you do not want to install or deploy software on every device, unless you can sell that as a service. In addition, if your organization requires certification prior to installing software on a device, your initiative can be held up in red tape for some time while you certify on the various flavors of devices and O/S's.

Louis Ritchie

http://www.symphion.com