Case Study 2 - The Eyre Place Osteopathic Practice

The Problem

The Eyre Place Osteopathic Practice has been helping local IT staff with shoulder and back problems for a number of years.

They use a PC to handle practice e-mail and administration.

The hardware is new, has a good specification and is more than adequate for the tasks it performs.

However, over a number of months the PC performance had deteriorated and numerous alerts were being displayed.

Investigation

After a quick examination, a number of issues were found:

• The virus checker schedule was set to run at times when the PC was most in use.
• Numerous tracking/malware cookies had managed to download on to the PC.
• Desktop indexing services were causing high levels of disk activity.

Each of these issues, in isolation, were sufficient to degrade PC performance but together they were fighting for system resources resulting in a poorly performing PC.