Your laptop is a valuable investment that needs to be cared for. Just simple monthly maintenance can keep your laptop in tp shape.
Here are some basic tips to help you do that. Because better you care for your laptop, the longer it will last.
Keep Your Laptop Clean
If you have a laptop, you are taking it with you to work, to a meeting, and on trips. Right? And when was the last time you cleaned your laptop? We are talking about physical cleaning!
Physical cleaning will prevent overheating and many other issues. The parts of the laptop you have to keep clean are the display, the case, the ports, the cooling ventilators, the keyboard, and the touchpad.
Clean Your Hard Drive
Having a laptop in good condition isn’t always about physical cleaning. Because when you are using your device regularly, you definitely have to clean your hard drive from unnecessary files or programs. Take time, look at programs you don’t need, and uninstall them properly. The same goes for your files. Determine what you need, back up the important ones, and delete others.
Defragment Your Hard Drive
Defragment is a process that repositions fragmented data on your hard drive to get faster reading times. You should defragment your hard drive regularly to get your laptop to run faster.
Here is how to access your Disk Defragmenter:
- Click Start
- Programs
- Accessories
- System tools
- Disk Defragmenter
How often should you defragment your laptop? For normal users, once per month should be enough.
What if I have SSD? While defragmenting helps keep a hard drive in shape, it doesn’t help solid-state drives (SSDs). Luckily, Windows 10 won’t let you run the defragmenting operation of SSD, instead, it will allow you to use optimization which can improve its performance.
Keep Your Computer Cool
Don’t use your laptop on soft surfaces like a bed. This behavior will worsen the airflow through the laptop. On the other hand, if you find a hard surface (cooling pad), you will prevent your laptop from overheating and improve the airflow.
Back-Up
You don’t want to lose your files. You should perform full back-ups on a monthly basis. Use software, upload your files in the cloud, or copy them to an external hard drive.
Updates
Every time you take a laptop with you and connect it to Wi-Fi, you are exposing your data to hackers. Simply, keep your firewall and anti-virus up-to-date. Updates are important because they fix various bugs and security issues of each software you are have installed.
Main photo Kari Shea
