Your computer is one of the most important pieces of tech that you own, so you will no doubt want to keep it in as a good a condition as possible for as long as you can. For this reason, you need to make sure that you know how to recognise some of the most common issues with your computer, and how you can fix them. Here are some of those issues that everyone should know, and how you can fix them on your own.
Wi-Fi is Slow or Unreliable
Does it seem like your Wi-Fi always seems to cut off at the worst possible times? In this era of working from home, more and more people have to rely on their Wi-Fi to be able to communicate with colleagues and clients. If you have bad Wi-Fi, it can seem like you are staring at nothing but a bunch of pixels on Zoom. On top of that, you might struggle to access certain sites, or could have to wait a long time for important documents to upload or download.
It might seem like a hopeless situation, but there are a few things that you can try to speed up your internet. The first is quite simple – have you tried turning it off and on again? You need to power down your router by unplugging it. Wait at least one moment for the connection to sever completely, but the longer you do wait the better. You can then plug everything back in and you will hopefully be good to go once more. On top of this, you can try restarting your devices.
Search Engine Redirects
Have you ever been browsing your computer and typed something into Google, only to get redirected to Bing instead? If you have, you might have put things down to a glitch and just moved on. However, this is not a glitch, but actually an indicator that you have some malware on your computer.
As pieces of malware go, it is not the most malicious. It could be described as being more of a nuisance, but it still needs to be dealt with properly. If you want to know how to eliminate this from your computer. Don’t think that you have to stick with a piece of malware simply because it is only a mild nuisance to you. You should get rid of it as soon as you find it to avoid it causing further problems.
Windows Takes a While to Boot
If you are on a windows computer, you might find that your computer takes a while to boot up and get going. This can be extremely frustrating if you are sitting there ready to go, whether it is for work or to play a game. Though you might think that it is because your computer is just getting slow, this is actually not necessarily true. Your computer might just be trying to open many applications during its startup.
Some programs set themselves to load when you log onto your Windows profile. This can be great as it means those programs will open as soon as you head onto your computer. For example, having Teams open automatically is great for anyone who uses it to communicate closely with colleagues. However, having too many of these applications all fighting to be booted can be to the detriment of your computer.
Open your Task Manager and take a look at the Startup tab. From here you will be able to disable any apps that you don’t want to open as soon as you start things up, and you could then notice a significant boost to the time it takes to get going.
Mac Startup Disk Full
If you have a Mac, at some point you are likely to see a notification that says “Your disk is almost full”. Why are you seeing this message? Well, a Mac, like any other computer, only has a certain amount of storage on it – usually 500GB. While this seems like it is a lot, it can fill up faster than we might imagine. Just picture the hard drive of your Mac being like a wardrobe – once it is full of clothes (or in this case, files) there will be no room for more until you have a clear out.
Ideally, you should not take your Mac’s storage above 85% capacity, as you will begin to notice it seriously slowing down at this point. You might even get some errors and other things that make it difficult for you to use your computer. Therefore, if you see the storage warning message, you need to fix it as soon as possible.
There are three ways that you can do so – delete files from your Mac, move the files to cloud storage or some other external storage solution, or install a second internal hard drive on your Mac. The first is handy if you just want to get rid of the files, the latter two are more important if you want to hang onto them. The preference is yours.
Know Your Computer
You need to make sure that you know your computer inside and out. This is going to be the only way that you will be able to overcome these errors. They are common enough and easy to fix. While you should take your computer to a specialist if you are having a more serious error, you should know how to fix some of the most basic errors of your computer yourself.
There will always be something wrong that could crop up with your computer. Many of these errors will be nothing more than simple fixes that can be done in a matter of minutes. You don’t have to be a technical whizz to manage them – many of them are even simple enough for even the most tech-resistant people to pull off. Teach yourself how to tackle these common mistakes – you never know when you might need this knowledge!
