In continuation to my earlier blog about improving the performance of desktops, this post has some information regarding the initiatives that Desktop Central had taken inline. Maintaining the desktops hard disks with proper disk cleanup, regular defragment for performance and keeping it bad sector free may sound easy but practically very cumbersome, when done for a bunch of networked machines. This is mainly because of the lack of centralized tool from Microsoft for the disk preventive maintenance of the desktops. All you have to do is manually initiate the disk maintenance tools and redirect its output to a text file, review the file for any issue based on the written logs, take a decision either to fix the issue through tool or replace the hard disk drive and store the text file for future reference.(huh.. :shock:) The very same process has to be repeated on all the machines and at a periodic intervals (either for a week or month) inorder to detect the early hard disk issues, improve machine performance and maintain trouble free environment. Some administrators do this using scripts, but the issue is it becomes a tedious job to have a status update of the completion of the tool consolidated for the entire network.
Desktop Central team is working on to automate this process and add in additional intelligence to capture status updates about the tool’s run state. Once the module is ready (soon after the SP2 release) administrators can schedule their networked desktops preventive maintenance (initially version will support chkdsk, defrag and cleanmgr) from a single place and view its results from a single console. The advantages here are,
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| – It reduces the administrators overhead to run around and configure the tools at every desktop,- Gives a snap shot of the entire network’s hard disk bad sector, defragment and cleanup status.
– Based on the reports and history reference administrator can be make purchase decisions. |
Soon this would be possible through Desktop Central. Please add in your views and requirements.
