Maintaining Hardware
The best way to deal with a problem or repair a failure is to make sure that it does not happen in the first place. This is especially true of hardware, and as such it is important to properly care for and maintain any hardware that you may possess, or deal with in the workplace. Problems usually have the tendency to occur at the worst of times, so in the best of times it is good to prepare for this.
Some preventative maintenance exercised a little and often, is one of the best ways in which to go about maintaining hardware. It has the potential to minimize any impact by catching and repairing failures before they occur, or by preventing them altogether.
The level of maintenance required on a piece of hardware most often depends on the hardware itself. Something like a monitor is relatively simple to maintain: all that is usually needed is to clean the screen carefully every couple of days for dust, not tampering with the insides as there is a risk of x-ray emissions, and not leaving it on for extended periods of time. However, something more complex like a printer requires more attention, more frequently. There are also different ways you need to learn to maintain different types of printers. Dot matrix, ink jet and laser printers use similar but fundamentally different technologies, and as such these technologies need to be taken into account when maintaining them.