Merilee’s Tips & Tricks for Reporters: Let’s Get Started!
By Merilee S. Johnson, RDR, CRR, CRC, RSA
Welcome to The Veritext Reporter Tips and Tricks, a column that explores ways technology can make us more successful in what we do. Let’s get started!
When you first turn on your computer, do you hit the power button and walk away because you know it’s going to be a few minutes until your computer fully boots up? Do you wish you could give your computer a kick of caffeine to get it to move faster? Are there times when you need restart your computer and the lawyers are waiting on you? A long boot up time can feel even longer in that scenario.
Here are a few tips to shave seconds (maybe minutes?) off your computer’s boot time!
- Open your Task Manager
- Tech Tip: The quickest way to open your Task Manager is to hit Ctrl+Shift+Esc
- You should see a pop-up window with various tabs at the top. If you do not see these tabs, enlarge or maximize the Task Manager window
- Select the tab labeled Startup
- Under the Startup menu tab, you will see a list of all the programs your computer runs when you first bootup your computer.
- Next to each program you can select to enable or disable these programs upon initial your start.
- Disable any programs you do not need up initial startup.
How do you decipher which applications to enable and disable? A couple things to keep in mind:
- When programs are enabled to run during startup, not only does that slow down your boot time, but they continue to run in the background, using system resources and slowing down your computer. By disabling programs in this startup menu, that is all you’re doing; you’re disabling them. You are not uninstalling or deleting a program. You are merely telling your computer, “I don’t need you to run these programs upon initial startup.”
- Any programs you disable will be enabled once you click on the program file or icon.
- Examples of programs to disable:
- Network (or wireless) printers – you can disable this upon start up. Once you select “print” in a file, your printer will then be enabled.
- Skype – you don’t need Skype when you first bootup. Simply double-click your Skype icon when you’re ready to login.
- Instant Messaging programs – you can manually turn these on by double-clicking the program file or icon when you’re ready to IM.
- Dropbox or other cloud-based programs – if you use these primarily for backing up or transferring files, enable these after you boot your computer. There are no negative effects to disabling this until you need it.
Cleaning up the programs you want to run during startup will give your computer a little kick start and you will see an improvement the next time you startup!
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