The other thing that is a concern to me is the proper shutdown of the operating system (Windows). There is a battery backup that supposed to shut down the operating system due to a power outage. But too often our maintenance department just kills the power without properly shutting down Windows. Now as someone who has repaired computers for 20 years I know that this can really cause problems with the operating system.

With our company getting more and more machines with Windows running in the background I have plans to put together a procedure for each of the machines as to do a proper shutdown. It will be laminated and placed near the main power switch so that the maintenance department understands the procedure.

I think that the most recent problem we had is due to maintenance killing the power without a proper shutdown to do a PM on the machine. When they brought the machine back up it had no operating system. Hard drive failure could've been just powering down the machine improperly or a slight voltage spike to the hard drive at start up. That's not uncommon even in desktop computers that have poor power supplies.

May actually be better in the future to switch the hard drives over to SSD (solid-state drives). There is a considerable wear and tear on physical drives just due to vibration even with shock absorption. SSD's would have none of these problems because there's no moving parts.