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Getting Your Computer Ready for School

Back when I was a student, everyone packed up their portable typewriter for the move to campus. Lots of people got a new typewriter as a graduation gift, but I didn’t. I ended up using one we bought when I was in high school.

The story is probably the same for you, except that it’s a computer, not a mechanical typewriter.

Whether you just bought a new one or kept your old faithful companion with all of its stickers, you need to do a few things to get the machine ready for college.

Getting Old Faithful ready for college

Is Old Faithful sick?

If the machine crashes a lot, has trouble (and takes a long time) doing things, or pops up weird ads to play poker or look at porn, you probably have a virus. (You just had to download that fancy screensaver, didn’t you?) Take a deep breath—bite the bullet—pay the computer repair shop to clean it up for you.

Now that Old Faithful is feeling better …

  • Back up the really important stuff. (Your only picture of Uncle Ed, the school addresses of your buddies, and so forth.) A flash drive is a good place to store this kind of thing. If you have a Gmail account, you have space on Google Drive. That’s another good place to store backups. Computers crash at school. Computers get stolen. There are some things you don’t want to lose.
  • Clean house. Go through all those files and ask yourself whether you really need that homework from your first Junior semester in high school.
    • You might like to delete or hide some of those embarrassing photos.
    • And that desktop image.

Both Old Faithful and the new guy

  • Update your operating system. You should do this after the housecleaning, and it will take a looooong time, so plug your computer into the power supply, and set it up to download the updates before you go to bed. Even a brand new computer should go through this every month or so.
    • Apple users: Click the little picture of an apple in the upper left corner of your screen. Then choose “About This Mac.” Choose “Software Update.” You might get a list of items to choose—you want all of them. If the screen says “Your Mac is up to date,” congratulations: you are done!
    • Windows users: Follow the instructions in this link. If you get to choose which things to update, you want all of them.
  • Get Google Chrome web browser. This is the one that works best with University stuff. Go to Google Chrome Web Browser.
  • If you already have Google Chrome, run the update program. (It’s not automatic.) When you are in the Chrome browser, click the Chrome drop-down menu in the upper left, then choose “About Google Chrome” and follow the instructions.
  • Set up a file folder system. You want a quick way to find things on your computer, and the strategy is much the same for Apple, Windows, and Google Drive. (By the way, you can put folders inside other folders, so you can have a Fall Semester folder and an English folder inside that one.) The only files that belong on the desktop are the ones you use daily. Everything else should be hidden in folders.
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Comments

  1. Curt AllenAugust 7, 2022 at 2:01 PM

    An earlier version of this had an unhelpful link for Windows updates. I think this one is better.

    ReplyDelete

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