As a practitioner, you are no doubt highly aware of hygiene and cleanliness in your practice but have you looked inside your PC’s lately?

The pictures shown below are from a computer that we recently repaired.  The dust was so thick over the fan on the CPU it caused it to be ineffective and stopped the fan from cooling the CPU.  The temperature rose from a standard 40 degrees up to 98 degrees within 10 minutes.  This also caused the hard disk to fail so badly we were lucky to get any data to transfer.

You and your staff are the engines of your business success but your PC’s are the engines of your practice management. If your server crashed, how do you find your patient records, appointments, charts or financial records, how do you bill a patient?

If you have been diligent with your backups you will get yesterdays data back, if you have not you can probably kiss your business goodbye.

All PCs can benefit from a little regular physical housekeeping. You see, a PC’s constantly whirring fans draw in a huge volume of air. Even in a seemingly clean environment, the amount of dust and dirt that can build up inside a PC’s case is nothing short of astonishing. This layer of dust literally acts like a sweater on your PC’s delicate electronics, preventing them from getting rid of their heat, and heat is the enemy of all electronics.

At best, excess heat will shorten the life of a PC; if allowed to worsen, it may cause erratic behaviour, data errors, spontaneous reboots, and other intermittent problems; and in the worst cases, a PC can literally cook itself to death.

Damp air and moisture can also damage a dusty PC as the dust can absorb moisture and cause the internal components to short out or corrode.

It is a good idea to get your computer hardware maintenance checked and cleaned regularly to avoid down time and loss of data.  I would suggest a clean out every 12 months.