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Proactive maintenance means keeping an eye on things, even when everything appears to be going fine. And some of the tools that we can use include Device Manager. Device Manager is included in just about every Operating System. It may not be called Device Manager in some of the other Operating Systems, but on all Microsoft systems, Device Manager is an important component. In NT 4.0, on Windows 2000, even on the clients - we can use Device Manager to determine what is in our system and what resources it's currently using. And, if we have any conflicts. And we can even solve for the conflicts and assign new resources through Device Manager. That's a good thing to know for the test - is that we can use Device Manager to determine where conflicts are as well as to solve for the conflicts. System Information is a new tool that's in Windows 2000, and System Information allows us to determine a tremendous amount of information about the system in regards to drives, in regards to protocols, in regards to all of the components that are in the system - hardware and software. But we can only find information in System Information. We don't solve problems in System Information. There is a section in System Information that will show us conflicts, but we can't solve for those conflicts. In other words, we can't reassign resources within the System Information tool. Again, that's a good thing to know for the test - the contrast between Device Manager and System Information. And I would highly recommend that you spend some time on that software in whichever Operating System that you're using - they're different depending on the different Operating Systems. The System Information is only included on Windows 2000 systems. NTHQ is NT Hardware Qualifier, and it came out with NT software, Windows NT Server software. But it's also used in Windows 2000. And NTHQ will tell us whether the hardware that is in the system is working correctly with the Operating System. As a matter of fact, we can use NTHQ to determine whether we should purchase a particular piece of hardware. But again, we can use the vendor's recommendations on that as well, if it's a vendor that we trust, and if we can get the literature to go along with the equipment. But NTHQ checks out the compatibility of a piece of hardware with the Operating System, whether that's NT or whether that's Windows 2000. So, depending on the Operating System, we have many different tools that can help us stay abreast of the network. One of the best tools is the Remote Notification tool. Because a Remote Notification Tool allows us to be more than one place at a time. In other words, we need to be out and about determining what's going on with the different servers on our network. Maybe even communicating with some of the other people on our team, or communicating with the users to determine what we should do next. But at the same time, something's got to baby-sit the network, so that if anything goes wrong, that we'll be notified about it. Well, Remote Notification will do just that. We can setup an Alert, and we can alert ourselves and any other Administrators of a failure in regards to any of the main system resources. And there are many different programs that can set an alert - for example, we can have an alert with a failure of SQL, or an alert with a failure of our Exchange server. So, we can use this for applications as well as for system components. If a server crashes, we can have an alert. If our RAID controller has a problem, we can have an alert for that. And these alerts can send a network message out to any computer or user that we choose, and we can put the recipients into the console message, or into the alert status message. Or we can also send out an email. So, we can setup systems, and it depends on the Operating System, but we can setup systems to alert us so that we can take better care of our network by being able to get out of our office or out of the server closet and go see what needs to be done - but still have something electronic or have technology baby-sitting the network for us. And it's good for us to be able to circulate, because we really need to understand the entire environment in which the network operates and all the servers operate. Because there are many things that we can control about the environment. In our next chapter, we'll discuss the Network Environment.