I've been preaching the benefits of having a Blog to my customers for many years, so it's about time I started one myself. Welcome to my first ever blog posting, I hope you enjoy my ramblings!  I will try to bring you regular updates and news from the IT world including some information of what I'm getting involved in.

Here is a good start:  I visited a customer this week who reported that their PC has had a noisy fan for the last few months and a few days ago it just stopped booting.  Their CPU fan and air-intake was so full of dust that the machine couldn't cool itself correctly.  If they had called me a few weeks ago then I could have saved a disaster by performing a basic service at £30 and restoring the machine to full working order.  But because the customer ignored the warning signs they allowed the machine to overheat to a critical point and the hard drive failed, causing a massive loss of data.  It was a home PC and they've lost their entire photo collection and music library as well as all their personal information and emails.  The machine is fine now after a good clean and a new hard drive, but a simple service a few weeks ago would have saved them over £100 and prevented the loss of data.

Lessons learnt: always always always backup your data, and if your machine is looking a bit dusty around the air intakes then book a service to keep your PC or Laptop in good working order.  Normal service intervals are around 24 months for machines with infrequent use or 12 months if used for more than 4 hours a day, or for machines in rooms with wooden flooring (which causes massive dust build-up)