Common Sense Windows 10 Questions
During my first semester, I came across many university students (computer science ones included) who have problems fixing even the most basic computer problems. Let me help a little.
Hello world! Now that the University Winter break is here, I am starting to write again.
During my first semester, I came across many university students (computer science ones included) who have problems fixing even the most basic computer problems. Let me help a little.
Before I start, the common sense first step is always to google your problem.
Startup Programs
Why are there so many pop-ups when I turn on my laptop?
This is one of the most common questions I get from friends.
When you install a program, it often registers itself as a start-up program. Meaning, it will start running when your computer starts. To look at this, go to your task manager and the Startup tab, you can disable all the programs that you do not wish it to start. Skype, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Steam, Spotify to name a few. Disabling the programs you don't need often helps battery life since you have fewer programs running in the background.
Scaling
Why is everything so blown up? I don't need my text to be so huge at all.
In Windows, you can change the text/UI scaling. This means you can change the size of your windows, start menu, right-click context menu, etc. The setting is in the Settings App, try it out a little.
Slow Hard Drive speed
Why does it take 5 minutes for my laptop to boot up?
If your laptop takes more than 3 minutes to turn on, you are probably using a magnetic hard drive. There is no real way to boost the startup time significantly, but there are tricks to make your hard drive just a tiny bit snappier.
Defragmentation:
Your hard drive stores data on magnetic disks sequentially. When you remove some data, there will be gapes between existing data. New data will be sliced and filled partially in these gaps, resulting in slow speeds. Defragmentation will gather all these data, re-align them.
Select the drive you want and click optimize.
Note: You do not need to optimize if your Media Type is a "Solid State Drive" like mine.
And many other things
Seriously though, when you don't know something about your computer, just google it. You spent a little over 1 thousand dollars on it.
References
Microsoft Support on Defragmentation
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/17126/windows-7-improve-performance-defragmenting-hard-disk
