Periodic maintenance operations on the PC of the test bench

“We are noticing that the PC used on these stations are running slow and sometimes take up to 20 minutes to “boot up”  can you advise any upgrades we can install to speed them up?”

This is a remark we have received from customers who have been using our test benches for years. The possible recovery actions are those commonly put in place by the IT for similar problems on standard office PC.

First of all you should make sure that no viruses have attacked the PC, then perform few cleaning operations on the disk (defragmentation and similar), run a diagnostic program to check that the hardware of the PC is in good conditions.

It would help to know whether the deterioration has been gradual up to the actual situation or from a certain date on, in other words if the installation of some upgrade, or similar, has changed the conditions.

In some cases a RAM upgrade could help, and also the periodic transfer of the data collected throughout the tests from the PC of the test bench to a server or another PC.

If the problem is limited to one PC, out of several, and the same is quite old, a replacement could be taken in consideration once a preliminary compatibility analysis has been carried out to make sure that the existing data acquisition electronic can work with a new generation PC.

 by Marco Ragno