Regularly Scheduled Preventative Maintenance—For our residential customers

If the hard drive in your computer was about to fail, would you know? Many hardware failures are preceded by soft errors that will only show up through diagnostics or by reviewing your log files. For example, a hard drive that is on its last legs may be retrying several times before it can read or write data to the device. The data is eventually read or written, but performance is slow and at some point data will fail to be read or written correctly.

Any piece of hardware or software can be silently failing and you may not even notice. Computers should be checked regularly to find and correct any of these hidden errors before you lose valuable data like your tax returns, personal documents, or family pictures.

In addition to hardware problems, residential computers should be checked regularly for signs of spyware or virus activity.

Starbeam offers a maintenance subscription for residential customers which gives you an hour long checkup each quarter (4 times per year) to perform tasks like:

• Updating spyware and antivirus software
• Applying security updates from Microsoft and other software vendors
• Scanning your computer for spyware and virus infections
• Checking your hard drive for errors
• Defragmenting your hard drive

To keep your computer running fast and stable, we recommend regular visits from a computer professional. Regular visits allow you to:

• Keep your computer running as fast as possible. By removing spyware and other unnecessary software before your computer is unusable, you will have a more enjoyable computing experience.

• Decrease cost of repairs. Fixing a problem before total failure will give you the flexibility to perform repairs at your convenience rather than reacting to an emergency situation. A failing (but still usable) hard drive may allow us to recover data and replace the failing drive cheaply while waiting until after failure may require expensive data recovery techniques.

If you have questions about our maintenance program or would like to talk to us about setting up a maintenance schedule for your computer, please, contact us.

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