Thursday, January 26, 2012

Computer tech support 101


Every now and then, I get calls from people in the office, at home and in the other places to help them fix one computer problem or the other. Often a time, the problem is a slow computer. That is natural, however, you could make it fast again by doing some simple things. Today, I’m going to share my quick computer tech support 101 tips.

Clean up the computer

The first thing I like doing is to look for files and programs that are not important and then delete or uninstall them.  Some great places to look for files to be deleted is the recycle bin, downloaded files that are no longer of use, and temporary Internet files. After you have deleted these files and programs, you should defragment the hard drive as well.

Check the security tools

Check to see what security tools are installed. Without a good security tool, the computer is a host to all sort of malicious software that are not only eating resources and making the computer too slow but also are sending data somewhere else. Get a trusted antivirus and a good antispyware; run them and then remove any threats present on the computer.

Computer Specs

This is the part you cannot offer an immediate solution too. That is to say if the grade in terms of specs of the computer is too low. A super-duper laptop or desktop computer is one that will not choke when playing games or when running computer simulations. Such a computer must have a high-end graphics card, a high-end processor, large capacity hard drive to accommodate large files and strong motherboard to boot. Not everyone needs or has this type of computer though. If the specs are pretty poor, the first thing I recommend doing is adding RAM. This will make the biggest difference to the average user.

Limit the number of start up applications

The other thing you can do is limit the number of start up programs. Start-up programs are not only annoying when you turn on your computer but they also use up resources.

The tips above are pretty simple. The tips above can solve a good percentage of your computer problems.