Wishing all everyone and all our customers Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Just had a thought to let customers know a short list of things we wish we could tell everyone! Knowing or doing these things could have saved many of our customers a lot of time, effort, heartache and money.
Don’t encrypt your hard drive / SSD
Unless you really need to. Encryption keeps all data on the machine locked with a hard to break code. We don’t recommend it unless you have special reason to keep it away from anyone – most people don’t need their photos and PDFs encrypted, and it makes things impossible to recover if you don’t know the encryption key.
Backup your data (to local storage and in the cloud)
Now is a good time. Always have a backup = A least two copies of anything important (on two separate physical devices or places). We recommend customers to have a local backup to a USB stick, and to use some kind of cloud storage. Doing this means you can know for sure you have a backup in your hand, and there is also a backup off site in case of something happens to all the physical devices onsite (like fire or theft).
If things feel hot, get it checked out.
If your machine is hot to touch, something is probably not right and will likely leading to overheating issues. Fresh thermal paste, cleaning of heat sinks and fans and ensuring decent airflow should hopefully sort any overheating issues, before any permanent damage is done.
Don’t update drivers
If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. Unless something is broken or there’s promise of much greater performance or added functionality, you probably not need to update a driver – it can lead to problems such as worse performance, crashes or failing to load the OS. Also, we see all sorts of ‘driver update’ programs on customer machines and are very doubtful to the benefit of any of them – a lot of the time these programs come with adware, pop ups or worse and take up system resources. Recommend not to bother with these programs, or if really wanting to update drivers only download from the official website for the hardware.
Avoid using sleep / standby mode
Or, at least switch off / restart the machine regularly. Sleep has often caused problems such as screen staying black, or irregular behaviour after waking from sleep, or losing data when power lost during sleeping. With the speed of machines these days switching on doesn’t take so long. If you want to save a session of work with programs and documents open, try hibernate which is slower than sleep to action but doesn’t require power while hibernating.
Restart the machine regularly
As a machine is used there are often changes or updates that need processing during the shutdown or start processes. If this never happens, when the restart process finally happens the long list of jobs will at best take a long time or worse, go wrong and then it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the cause was (and fix it).
ssd encryption
