Preventive Maintenance
It appears that Hewlett Packard and most of the third party hardware maintainers are no longer performing annual preventive maintenance (PMs) on the systems and peripherals that they support, even though it is in their best interest to do so.
This does not mean that routine cleaning of equipment is not necessary. On the contrary, it is extremely important. At least once a year all equipment that has cooling fans with filters/screens should be vacuumed out. This is especially significant for systems with internal disk drives. If filters get clogged then the machine and drives are sure to overheat causing unnecessary downtime and potential data loss. During hot and humid summer weather, many computer room air conditioners will be taxed enough already without the added burden of dirty disk drives.
Ask your hardware maintenance supplier to perform an annual PM on your system. If they are unwilling then ask them to show you how to clean the filters.
On the same topic as Preventive Maintenance, don’t forget your software PM as well. Make sure you have a good Ignite tape and that it is stored in a safe location. Purge old log files. Remove old unused users from the system. Purge the directories of software demos that you declined to invest in.