For a smooth performance of a system, periodic maintenance is necessary. Tools like Disk Check, Disk Defragmenter, etc., helps in system maintenance. It is practically impossible for administrators to manually perform the maintenance on a regular basis.

Desktop Central provides an option to schedule these tasks at regular intervals to be executed on multiple computers simultaneously. It allows creating multiple tasks that can be created to execute various tools on different target computers at different intervals. Moreover, these tasks can also be done during off hours.

Disk Defragmenter

Disk gets fragmented as users create and delete files and folders, download files from internet, or install/uninstall programs. When a file or a folder is deleted from the hard disk, the space that was occupied by it will be used to store any new files. When a file gets saved, it uses the first contiguous free space that is large enough for the file and the remaining part of the file is saved in the next available free space.

The fragmented disk brings down the performance of the system as it takes a long time to retrieve the fragmented data from the disk even if the CPU or the memory is more than sufficient. Hence, periodic disk defragmentation is necessary to keep up the performance of the system. Desktop Central provides option to run the disk defragmenter tool on multiple machines simultaneously. It supports the following options:

• Verbose: Displays the complete analysis and disk defragmentation reports
• Analyze: Analyzes the volume and displays a summary of the analysis report.
• Force Defragmentation: Forces disk defragmentation regardless of whether it needs to be defragmented.

Check Disks

Disk errors related to bad sectors, cross-linked files, directory errors, etc., create problems in I/O operations. The Check Disk tool creates a status report of the disk based on its file system. Desktop Central supports the following options to run the check disk tool:

• Verbose: Displays the name of each file in every directory as the disk is checked.
• Quick Check: This option is available only for the NTFS File system. Selecting this option will perform the check disk operation quickly by skipping the checking of cycles within the folder structure and by performing a less vigorous check of index entries.

Disk Cleanup

The Disk Cleanup utility helps in determining the unused files in the disk and deletes them to significantly increase the free space.

Wake On LAN

Wake on LAN tool remotely 'wakes-up' a machine (boots-up a machine) that is present in the network but not alive. For this tool to work, the machine should be configured to accept the Wake-on-LAN remote command. The Wake on LAN tool supports both manual and scheduled waking up of systems. It can be used to boot systems accross VLANs.

Remote Shutdown

Remote Shutdown tool of Desktop Central allows Administrators to perform the following tasks remotely:

• Shutdown
• Restart
• Hibernate
• Stand By
• Lock Computers

These tasks can either be done manually or scheduled to run at specified intervals. Separate tasks containing same or different computers can be created and scheduled to run at different intervals. The status of each of the task is available for verification.

Chat

Desktop Central presents integrated chat, which makes the communication simple and efficient. This enables collaborating communication between IT administrators and users in online, while trouble shooting desktop issues. The auditing capability in chat helps enterprises stay compliant with standard regulations by recording and securely archiving a copy of each chat session.

For more details, refer to the Windows System Tools section in the online help.