In hot weather you are likely already planning how to adapt your working day. As well as your people you will want to consider your IT kit as a hot environment can impact its performance and be detrimental to its health.
At high temperatures servers & network equipment are at risk of hardware damage causing them to fail, if you don't already keep them in an air-conditioned room and instead keep them in a closed cupboard that space can heat up dramatically. We strongly recommend doing what you can to keep them cool, 27°C or below using portable air con or fans to move air. Normally you would want to keep them at a much lower temperature, around 21°C is ideal.
With laptops and desktop computers high temperatures can cause them to reduce their performance as when the processors get very hot, they will throttle their performance to reduce the temperature and limit physical damage. You may see this as the computer being "laggy", slow to respond and when that happens, we would recommend taking the following steps:
In cases of extreme heat there is a fail-safe thermal cut off which will turn your computers and servers off to protect them and not allow you to start them until they have cooled down. If this happens do not attempt to restart them until they have had suitable time to cool down as that fail safe means you are at substantial risk of causing damage.
Managing Director, Westway IT
John is the founder of Westway IT and works directly with small businesses across Gloucestershire to keep their IT secure, productive and stress-free.
With a BSc in Computer Science and hands-on experience supporting businesses from 1 to 40 users, he specialises in cyber security, Microsoft 365 and business automation.
An award-winning MSP owner and active member of the global IT community (including GTIA), John focuses on solving real business problems, not just technical ones.
Published: 15 July 2022 | Last Updated: 15 July 2022
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