Week 9: System Management

This week the focus of the class was on the practices of system management.  These practices include hardware management, power management, system performance, and system security.  In my studies and personal experiences, I have practiced and utilized many of these techniques on my own personal computers. Hardware management deals with topics such as managing device drivers for operating systems such as Windows, Linux, and OS X.  This is usually accomplished using various management tools such as device manager (for Windows).  This week put a special emphasis on device driver roll-back and how to deal with incompatible drivers.  We also explored the various control panel programs available with the three main operating systems (Windows, Linux, and OS X) and how they are used to manage and configure the system resources.  Power management options were also discussed this week.  New features such as Advanced Configuration and Power Interface have been added to operating system functionality to help promote green computing standards.  Various system performance practices such as system tuning and system monitoring play a large role in the health of personal computers.  The operating system provides a variety of tools and snap-ins to help monitor and fine-tune system resources and performance.  Perhaps the most important topic discussed this week was system security.  This includes disaster recovery, mal-ware protection, and fault tolerance.  I learned a great deal of new information about the security aspect of system management including fault-tolerance and backup practices used by many corporations to protect their data.  I also learned more about the RAID configurations.

This week the material and homework were not very difficult to understand.  In fact, I learned a great deal of new information that will be very useful in the future.  The only real challenge was that we had to cover two weeks of content in one week due to the cancellation of class due to the weather.

System management is a very important topic to learn if one wishes to enter the Information Technology field.  It is also a good topic to learn for any computer user.  There are many malicious threats on the Internet today and users need to learn how to protect themselves from such threats.  Data protection and system performance are very important within the corporate world.  Business often operates at the speed-of-light which means quick and reliable access to corporate data for decision-making is very essential for the survival of many corporations.  As Information Technologists, we are obligated to ensure that this is data is readily available when and where it is needed.  These techniques can also be used to manage and protect personal systems which may contain personal information.