While talking with a colleague the other day, he told me he had been without his work PC for two days. It seems the PC suffered from “configuration creep,” the malady that occurs over time whereby your PC accumulates all sorts of undesirable executable code, DLLs, temporary files and the like. My friend’s PC had become too cluttered and sluggish to use. The Help Desk technician took it away to completely rebuild it. The hapless user got back a clean PC, but he had lost all his preferred configuration settings. Even worse than that, he had lost two days of productivity.

Unfortunately, this is not a rare occurrence. With viruses and other malware on the increase, service technicians find themselves busier than ever, rebuilding or re-imaging malfunctioning PCs. And, companies are beginning to take notice of the cost of this kind of support, which can run into hundreds of dollars for a few hours of repair time.

I recently came across a company with a solution that addresses this specific problem. Tampa-based Persystent Technologies focuses on the availability and the performance of client PCs. The product, Persystent Enterprise, has numerous features that automate the stability of PCs.

Persystent Enterprise deploys an agent on each PC that enforces policies governing the configuration of the PC. When a user boots up his PC, the agent checks to make sure the PC is in a healthy state. It does so before the operating system loads, in case the operating system is corrupted. If the PC is out of compliance with the pre-defined desired state of health, Persystent runs a short routine to repair the damaged PC. The repair does not require any intervention from IT or the user, and it takes just a minute or two.

Two minutes in a hands-off repair vs. several hours for hands-on re-imaging. Which would you prefer for your enterprise?

I spoke with an IT manager at a healthcare facility that has deployed Persystent Enterprise on almost all its PCs. She told me they adopted this solution to keep support costs down. It used to take a technician between four and six hours to repair just one device; now it is automatic with a simple reboot of the PC. The cost is about $100 per managed device, which is easy to justify relative to the costs of frequent service on the devices.

Linda Musthaler is a principal analyst with Essential Solutions Corporation.