Tag: local minneapolis tech support
5 Common Mistakes People Do to Their Computer
Ah, finally…it’s time for the Doctor to tell her patients what they are doing wrong with their computers. One thing I will tell you for sure not to do is, floss at night! But there are many things we find our clients doing that are just flat out bad, wrong and ugly. Your computer will thank you if you listen to this advice.
1.) Never restarting. Many of you keep your computers on all day and night. Give it a restart on occasion! It’s good for the computer to refresh itself.
2.) Never do your updates. I can’t tell you how many computers we look at each week that never get basic updates. These include Adobe, Java, Flash, Windows and your anti-virus.
3.) Shutting off with the power button. You should always try to shut down your computer the proper way by going to your start button and selecting “‘shut down”. This allows the operating system to shut down as it was intended. By just pushing the power button, you are forcing a shut off and sometimes the computer’s operating system will be corrupted after doing that. You may see some repair windows come up the next time you turn it on.
4.) Not buying enough memory for your computer. If you have had a tune up done by us, we conduct a 22 pt checklist and part of that checklist includes checking your memory. It’s important to have enough to make your computer time fun and fast! No one wants a sluggish computer experience. We can help you with memory; to set up an appt, give us a call!
5.) Overspending on a computer. Many of our clients have told us that they paid over $1000 for a family home computer. I’m going to guess that was years ago, because now you can get a decent home tower/desktop computer for well under $500. Before you go shopping, call us and get a consultation done and we will help you purchase what you and your family needs, save you money and save you shopping headaches! Many times we can help you buy it online, get shipped to your home and we can come help set it up!
Hibernation Vs. Sleep Mode: What’s the difference? And why you should know!
Many of our clients at Call That Girl call in with problems and sometimes they tell us that their computer doesn’t come out of sleep or hibernate very well. I have learned from the old XP days that not all computers are comfy in sleep mode. The computers may be sluggish and don’t want to spring back to life so fast, or they are just aging overall. When Vista came out, I called it the “Vista Coma”, and alerted all of those clients to just not use sleep mode as it usually caused them problems. Windows 7 is not so problematic though, I’m guessing because the computers are selling with higher amounts of hardware memory to allow the sleep and hibernate functions to work as they should.
Let’s do a quick review now of Hibernation vs. Sleep Mode in non-techie terms
Hibernation mode:
- Primarily a power saving function
- Saves data to the hard drive
- Turns off the computer
- Uses the least amount of power
- Use this mode when you know you are leaving your laptop and might not have a chance to juice up the battery and you don’t want to lose your data.
Sleep mode:
- This function is also power saving on your battery
- Puts the computer into an “as is” condition so when you come back, everything you were working on should be back to where it was
- Should take just a few seconds to resume back to how you left it
- Use of this mode is great for those that are fast laptop people, who up and leave the computer often, travel and those who need to close their lids quickly due to security purposes.
In a nutshell, as you read in the quick review here, sleep mode is the best to use for laptops. Hibernate is more like a shut down mode.
For those having problems, here is a quick guide:
- XP users with low memory – neither should be used if you are having problems
- Vista users with low memory – avoid using the sleep mode if you are having problems
- Windows 7 should not have problems, and if you do, you might want to get your computer looked at. Primarily, this is the best operating system for Microsoft so far and has the least issues we have seen with sleep and hibernate modes.
Are you a data hoarder, like me?
(pictures coming! they got lost in the website upgrade!)
That’s a picture of my hard drive on my laptop. Nice huh? I didn’t even think to look at the size of it until Windows alerted me that I was “very low on disk space” and earlier…my Dropbox told me that I was out of space there and I have a 50 gig account. Just because I run a technical business, doesn’t mean that I am technically perfect with my data. I do back up though, and that is important…but things are pretty sad when your assistant tells you that you are a hoarder. I can’t help it, I’m very creative, I’m a quick thinker and most importantly…I’m savvy enough to do a lot of things myself and FAST. If you’re like me, you may have the exact same issues. Our email boxes are clogged (because we are communications freaks and can never delete anything), our documents folders are insanely packed with little screen shots of everything we have made, images off the internet or just random thoughts of insanity (I have 100′s of text files from notepad lol). My beginnings have no ends! Well, they do have ends because I get stuff done, but now I need to really reign in these issues and take control for once. Stop the data hoarding. I will not hire a therapist!!!
It’s time for me to have a “data tune up” of sorts. Get some data off this computer and get things all squared up. …it’s time to let go. Free myself of years of data and stupid ideas that never went anywhere or worse yet, just OLD stuff that I MADE NEW to replace it. Why do I need that? The big question is, what do I need to keep and what can I pitch? I can’t pitch anything…I fear I will want to use it again or need it and there is no solid solution for me but to get yet even more data storage and figure out a way to search it fast and use it fast. Or…do the impossible and delete old data. <insert a tear here>
I started the data hoarding clean up with moving everything off of my laptop and into the Dropbox account. Then I went through the Dropbox data and moved anything past 3 months out of it and on to the computer at the office. That computer is also getting backed up daily from Mozy.com
What to do after that? Now I have moved all the data, but have I done anything that will help my data hoarding issue? I have to “go through” (my aunt’s favorite words) the data that I don’t need to use in my daily life yet again and delete, delete, delete unfortunately. I seriously do not need all of this data anymore! I still can’t delete, it’s like giving up a part of my soul.
Everything is in order for data deletion. Now…I can’t pull the trigger. But my laptop is now free of all that unused Dropbox data and it can breathe happy again. I gave the computer a whole tune up as well and it’s running quite nice now! Watch for part 2 next week of how I deleted my data and what steps I went through to get it cleaned up. I plan on doing it over the weekend, and it will be a tough one for me!
7 Things You Should Never Do To Your Computer
Did you know?
- That the longer you leave a computer in a repair state, the harder and more expensive it may be to fix?
- That Googling repairs yourself does work, but often times gets you in worse situations
- You trying to fix complex issues yourself can lead you down a road of hours of wasted time and might take us longer to repair, thus costing you even more time and money
- Free is free. Pay for the good stuff. Submit a request here to save that time and money
- Not backing up your critical data can cost you $1,000’s later (data recovery)
Things you should never do
- Factory restore/reset on your computer unless you have all of your data backed up. I mean ALL.
- Edit the Registry, unless you really know what you’re doing (this is for the Googlers)
- Take apart your laptop to look at the motherboard (laptop teardowns are complex, take time and have tons of tiny parts that are not easy to put back together once taken apart.)
- Reinstall your operating system without application and drivers disks (You will not have access to the internet afterwards, no sound, no graphics software, etc)
- Delete data on your computer if you are not 100% sure of what it is (Like large mysterious files)
- Put your computer into an oven to fix it, just please do not do this
- Lay your laptop on ice to cool it down if it’s getting hot to the touch (instead, lift the back end up with a book and blow out the fan ports with dust air)
Things you can do if you are experiencing problems
- Restart your computer if things are not working right (a restart puts everything back into place usually)
- Turn off your computer on occasion, let it breathe
- If your computer is shutting off randomly and is not hot, take out the battery and power cord for 10 minutes, plug in the power cord only and start up the computer. Batteries going bad are a large factor when computers just shut off.
- System restore if…
- You just did something to your computer and it’s not working right
- A Windows update went bad and things don’t work right on your computer
- You’re sure you have everything backed up, or can back up before the system restore
Now that you’ve read the list, you may be interested in knowing a few things about repair shops and Call That Girl
- Sometimes what seems like an easy fix may not be. Sometimes we charge a flat fee for a repair, but spend hours working on the issue. That is why on occasion, a repair is not fixed in one or two days.
- Unlike the big box giants, our repairs stay in Minnesota, no depots here at Call That Girl
- Our remote helpdesk is run by people in Minnesota
- Our prices at Call That Girl can never “match the competition” because we are already priced lower than the big box giants and most of our local competitors
- We do run specials and offer coupons, if you’re out to save money, watch our newsletters and website.
