Computer Hygiene for Secondary Students

There are some simple ways you can help your child improve the management of their school laptop device. These same simple tricks are useful for your own home computing devices.

.. Keep up to date: Take updates when available

.. Keep your device clean: Regularly Shutdown or Restart your computer

.. Keep your device singing: Ways to Manage Hard Drive Storage

.. Keep your device Light: How to Clear Up Space

💻 Take Updates when available

One of the most important things you can do to maintain and improve your device, is to take updates as soon as they become available. You can check for updates manually by going to your device update settings and clicking “Check for Updates”. You cannot always rely on your notifications to inform you of available updates.

Keeping your devices up to date improves many aspects of the device including:

.. Reduces the risks of a cyber attack

.. Improve battery and hardware longevity,

.. Fixes bugs/prevents potential issues,

.. Adds new features that can be very useful to you, the user!

ST Mary’s College ICT Team recommends you check for updates at least once a week to ensure your device stays healthy, efficient and protected.

💻 Regularly Shut down/Restart Computer

We’ve all heard the words “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”, It’s the starting point for all IT support, and why? Because it works! Computers process information at incredible speeds. The computer handles 3.5 BILLION instructions and equations EVERY SECOND. Having that many instructions to do per second can get tricky when you have been doing them for the past month. The longer you go without giving your computer a break by restarting, the higher the likelihood of there being a problem is.

Most IT professionals will tell you to restart your computer at the start of each day to ensure that issues caused by a lack of restarting are avoided, however this isn’t always practical. The ST Mary’s College ICT Team recommends restarting your device at least once at the start of each week.

If you encounter an issue with your device of any kind, (a digital issue, that is. Restarting won’t exactly help you fix that broken screen!) always start with a restart or full shutdown, it might just save you time and a visit to your IT team!

💻 Ways To Hard Drive Storage Management

One common issue many people face is their device storage becoming full. It happens to everyone. In this digital age, we all handle a ton of data every day, and our first thought when we download a file or funny cat video isn’t “I wonder how much storage I have left on my devices hard drive?”. Unfortunately, your device’s storage isn’t infinite, and the closer you get to that dreaded full storage warning, the slower your device will get.

Computer hard drives are vital for feeding your computers “CPU” (“Brain”) all the information needed to have a usable file and receiving instructions from the “CPU” about what to do with the file (for example, “Open this”, “Save that”, “Move that file over there”). The more you have in storage, the more your “CPU” and Hard Drive have to communicate.

Imagine you’re at a new library (a new, empty hard drive), where there are only a few books on the shelves, now imagine you are asked to find the one titled “How to make Windows work”, You go to the shelf for books that start with the letter “H”, easily find the book, as it is the only one on the entire shelf, and take it back to the person who asked for it.

Now imagine the library fills its stocks with thousands of books, as many books as it could possibly hold. Now you are asked to find the book titled “j73hcfd3inbvmry23314.png”. You go to the “J” shelf, see it has thousands of books. You proceed to spend the next 3 weeks looking for the right book, and when you return to the person who asked for that book, they are (understandably) quite annoyed you took so long to complete their request, and shout at you “Why are you taking so long to load?!! *GROAN* My whole computer is freezing!!” The ST Mary’s College ICT Team recommends keeping only the files you need on your local device.

💻 How to clear up space

If you’re a “data hoarder”, and you can’t bring yourself to delete old files because “You might need them one day” or you aren’t sure what the file is and if its important. You can use a USB or external hard drive to keep your files without filling up your drive.

“But, I have deleted everything I don’t need, and my hard drive is still so full!”, well lucky for you there is a common folder many people forget to delete the contents of which, on occasion, can take up as much as 50% of the entire computers storage! The file in question, your computers “Downloads” Folder.

Some people believe that the downloads folder is just a record of the things you have downloaded in the past, however, it is a folder like any other, and everything you see in it, is taking up valuable space in your devices storage. Often a lot of these files are duplicates of other files you have elsewhere in your storage, meaning you have hundreds, if not thousands of unnecessary, duplicated junk in your downloads folder. The ST Mary’s College ICT Team recommends you clear your downloads folder (and empty your devices recycle bin) once every 3-6 months, depending on how often you download files.

Oliver Fairweather

Visual Arts