Cry How To...
Recommended routine maintenance for Windows NT, 2000 and XP
The frequency of different maintenance activities will vary between sites and application areas. Please regard the following as a starting point (or as a check list) and make your own decisions.
The maintenance activities listed here have been divided into the following groups:
Daily Maintenance Activities
- Ensure that server is up and running.
- Check that the nightly backup has successfully run.
Weekly Maintenance Activities
- Check the NT event log (application, system and security). Try to resolve any warnings or errors reported there.
- Check free disk space. Identify if free space will become a problem. Purge temporary and old files as necessary.
- Disable or delete old accounts.
- Ensure that anti-virus software is up to date.
Monthly Maintenance Activities
- Perform a scandisk on all drives. Note:
- Running '
chkdsk /f' on each drive seems to be more thorough, but does necessitate a reboot.- Hans Schönwälder has contributed the tip that using '
chkdsk /r' is better still, although it may take a little longer to run.
- If a defragmenter is available then defragment the server hard disks.
- If suitable software available, then defragment the registry.
- Reboot the server.
- Review backup – to ensure that nothing has changed that necessitates new things being backed up or some things removed from the backup.
These notes have been tested with Windows NT4, W2K and XP.
