Lisa Kanarek
Ticked off at technology
I love technology. Most of the time it makes my life easier until it crashes, locks up or just screws up my day by refusing to do what it’s supposed to do. The reality is that anything with a screen or a power cord is only as effective as the person using it, and offers a few challenges that are easy to overcome.
Challenge #1: Storing too much information on your computer. You can store more info on your computer than in your file cabinets. Great. But that doesn’t mean that your hard drive won’t fill up as quickly as your cabinets, which makes it difficult to find the files you need.
Solution: Dump the files on your hard drive the same way you would the papers in your file cabinets. If you know you won’t refer to a file again, dump it. Otherwise, you’ll waste too much time searching through files you don’t need, to find what you do need.
Challenge #2: Being vulnerable to losing data.
Solution: Don’t wait until your computer crashes to think about backing up your data. You never know when your computer is going to give out or in my case, crash to the ground. One of the best investments you can make is in a reliable backup system. Equipment is easy and relatively inexpensive to replace, while data is time-consuming and often impossible to replace.
Challenge #3: Using slow, outdated equipment.
Solution: If you take the time to figure out how much time you’re wasting while waiting to download files, print documents or process data, you’ll realize it’s time to upgrade your equipment. Computer prices drop daily and good deals are easy to find. How did we ever shop before the Internet!
Nice article. It shows here how can you prevent causing damage in your technology.
Excellent tips. Here’s a couple things that may help you as well.
Not sure what files to dump? Do a search based on date! In the “Search” function choose the “Pictures, Music, Video” or the “Documents” and run the search. When it completes change the view to “details” (click “view” up in the toolbar and select “details”) when you scroll to the left you will see a column marked “Date Modified”. When you click on it the column will now be organized from oldest to newest. Now you can get rid of all the stuff X years and older easily. CAUTION: do not use the “All files and folders” as you may accidentally delete a system file you need!
Want to clean up junk files that your computer collects. There are a few very good housekeeping tools you can use. Check out ccleaner or toniarts easycleaner. Both free and excellent programs at cleaning out the garbage temp files.
Old slow system? Yes they do rob you blind. Before shelling out the dollars on a new system. The “slow” problem usually lies within one component of your computer that’s cheap and easy to fix. Ram! A ram upgrade will make a huge difference to help you squeeze another year or two out of your system. Typically a $50 – $100 investment.
One other important note for slow systems. Occasionally when drives age and are about to fail the computer becomes slow waiting for that old drive to retrieve the information. Your system may have a drive that’s about to fail. You can use a free tool called HDD Health from panterasoft which takes a reading of your hard drives health showing you both it’s temperature and the percentage of health left. Also all hard drive manufacturers also have software to report back on the health of a drive and you can download the free tool from their sites.
John Scott
Thanks for the tips, John!