During an investigation into repeated network-adapter failures on a production file server, a systems administrator confirms that a newly released NIC driver from the hardware vendor should resolve the issue. The update has been approved by the change-advisory process and a 20-minute maintenance window has been scheduled. According to the CompTIA troubleshooting methodology, which action should the administrator take immediately before installing the driver?
Disable the Windows Update service to prevent concurrent patch installs.
Clear the system and application event logs to make post-change errors easier to spot.
Create and verify a full system backup or VM snapshot of the server.
Increase the virtual NIC receive buffer size and record the new baseline.
The methodology step that follows scope definition and change approval is to safeguard the current state of the affected system. Creating and verifying a full backup or virtual-machine snapshot gives the team a reliable rollback point if the new driver introduces new faults or the installation fails, thereby protecting data and service availability. Disabling Windows Update, clearing event logs, or adjusting NIC buffers may be useful at other stages, but none of those tasks provides a recovery path if the change goes wrong.
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