Skip to main content

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.
Labels:

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

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

If you are in trouble in a course

Every semester, I have one or two students who stop attending and stop submitting papers, BUT they are still on the books as students. Because they are missing major papers, they end up failing the course. This is not good for their GPA. It takes a lot of work to overcome an “F.” What to do if you are sinking Your first step should always be to discuss your problem with your course instructor. You may have some options to save your grade. If the issue is that you simply weren’t prepared for the course, working with our tutoring center might be your best choice. Before you make any major changes, discuss things with your academic advisor. Perhaps it would be wise to withdraw from the course. A “W” on your transcript doesn’t kill your GPA, and you are always free to try the course again at a later date. While you are in your academic advisor’s office, ask the question whether you are in the r...
Post a Comment
Read more

How is College Different from High School?

I was going to put together a list of the differences between high school and college, but then I ran into a website which summarized things beautifully: How is College Different from High School? This website comes from California State University, Chico, a campus which is much larger than ours. As I look over their list, though, the only change I would make is the comment on class size: Here at Ashland, your class size is likely to be smaller than what you experienced in high school! The maximum class size for our course is only 15 students, which means that you really can ask a question and hope for an answer! (Though, of course, class sizes in other departments will be different from ours.) Two differences worth emphasizing Doing the reading In high school, you usually got the reading assignment, then were expected to go home and read it. Many students didn’t actually do that because the teacher would typically spend the next day telli...
Post a Comment
Read more