Managing Your Computer
January 15, 2010 | Charles Lindauer
There are two major complaints/issues for computer users, in my experience, which I'll discuss in this article.
Protecting your data
The first issue is data loss. Hopefully, you've never experienced this problem.
Protecting business data should be a primary concern for all business owners and managers. As dependent as we all are on our computers, Macs or PCs, a hard drive crash or corruption can stop our businesses dead in their tracks.
A redundant backup plan is the answer to this problem. As a Macintosh consultant, I can provide several good solutions. PCs have different solutions, but the principle is similar:
- Have at least one backup, and preferably multiple backups.
- Make sure that they are easy to restore reasonably quickly.
- If possible, have at least one recent backup off-site.
If you have a bootable clone as one of your backups, then drive failure will not stop production for more than a few minutes. This is simple to do on Mac. If you’re a PC user, call your tech or IT person, or contact me for a referral.
Oh no... it's slow!
The second issue I run across frequently is slow computer performance. With PCs, virus and spyware can be a main culprit for slowing your computer down. On both platforms it can be due to neglected maintenance or an over-full hard drive.
All computers need to have some maintenance — much as your car does. While a lot of the routine maintenance tasks are built into the computer’s system software, some systems (and versions) are better at accomplishing maintenance tasks than others, so some necessary tasks may not be performed by your system. Once a year, or perhaps twice if a computer is in heavy production use, it’s a good idea to rebuild the directory, flush caches, etc. If you don’t know how to do regular maintenance, call your tech or myself for assistance.
(Caution! Dry, technical stuff)
Something most users don’t realize is that modern operating systems require a certain amount of contiguous free space on the boot hard drive (“contiguous” means “unbroken” space that is available in the same part of the drive). For Macs I recommend a minimum of 15%, although on larger drives it may be possible to shave that percentage a bit. Virtual memory and swap files are constantly written to the hard drive, and if there is not a good-sized chunk of free space in one place to write to, the system has to hunt for little bits of free space to write, erase, write etc. This can really slow a computer down. A good disk utility can check your drive and will rewrite your data to free up contiguous space. This check should be done as part of your routine maintenance.
If you are chronically low on drive space, consider a larger internal drive or an additional external drive. Computer storage, particularly hard drives, have become incredibly inexpensive. A 1 Terabyte drive can be had for as little as $85 these days, perhaps a little less if you find a sale. On most computers a new drive can be installed and data transferred within an hour. If you have a machine that is difficult to get into, external drives are not much more expensive, and work very well indeed.
If you want to keep productivity up, and down-time minimal, plan on getting annual maintenance on your Mac or PC, and pay a little attention to the amount of free space on your drive… don’t let it get too full.
If you are a Mac user, I can help with your maintenance. If you use a Windows or Linux system, I can provide a great referral.
Thanks for reading this article. I hope it was helpful. Check back soon for more... Articles on this site will be posted on my blog as well.
Charles Lindauer