5 Ways to Improve Your Laptop’s Performance On Your Lunch Break

We’re sure you’ve felt the mid-afternoon slump—you know, the one after you’ve just gotten back from the Chinese buffet and you’re having a hard time staying awake. Your technology experiences this, too, after a couple of months of heavy use. Where once your laptop felt snappy, it now feels sluggish. Fans spin louder, apps take longer to load, and the battery drains before you’ve had your second cup of coffee. What gives?

Laptops are machines, and machines require regular maintenance and “tune-ups” that are typically administered in the form of service-level habits that keep the devices running at optimal performance. These tasks are simple enough that you can knock them out on your lunch break.

The Tabs and Tasks Purge

Browsers are notorious for being some of the biggest resource hogs on your system.

Every tab open drains your RAM; perhaps more than you realize. We recommend you close your browser entirely at least once per day. This will flush out the browser’s memory and force it to stop any background processes that are fighting your processor for attention.

You can also use your bookmarks or tab manager extensions to save your important links so you don’t keep 40 tabs open at all times.

The Physical Airflow Check

Heat is a silent (and sometimes not-so-silent) killer of laptop performance. When a laptop gets too hot, the internal sensors slow down to keep the CPU from suffering permanent damage.

One reason why your laptop might be overheating is due to the vents. If you see visible dust, use a can of compressed air to clear it out. It also helps if you avoid working on a soft surface, like a blanket or couch, that might block air intake.

A cooler laptop is a faster laptop, and by maintaining airflow, you prevent this thermal throttling and extend the life of your internal components.

The Startup Slim-Down

Many apps, including some you don’t want or need, will automatically start themselves on launch the second your computer turns on, thereby slowing it down.

You can speed up your boot time by adjusting your startup apps. This is done via the Task Manager on Windows or the Activity Monitor on Mac. Disable anything that isn’t essential for the first 30 minutes of work; just make sure you work with IT so you don’t accidentally disable something that’s necessary for your device to function.

This can shave off seconds of your boot time and ensure your computer’s “brainpower” is reserved for actual work, not background apps that you aren’t even using.

The Desktop Zero-Out

Are you someone who saves their files on the desktop for easy access? This might work once or twice, but eventually, your desktop gets so clogged up that it can impact your device’s functionality.

Your computer treats every icon on your desktop as an active window that it must render constantly, so it’s better to move these files into organized folders in a cloud-based environment. This will speed up your system’s graphical performance and ensure that files are actually backed up and safe somewhere other than your desktop.

After all, files sitting in local storage are often the first ones lost during a hardware failure.

The Full Restart

Closing your laptop is not the same thing as restarting, and restarting is not the same thing as shutting your computer down.

Laptops will often go into a hybrid sleep mode when you close them that saves the current state of errors along with all your work. Once per week, we recommend you perform a manual restart—not a shutdown/turn-on. A restart is a specific task that clears the system cache and finalizes those pesky pending updates.

It’s the closest thing to a fresh start you’re going to get.

Curious for more ways your business can optimize its technology without a massive time commitment? The easiest way is to contact Direct Technology Group so we can handle it all for you. Learn more by calling us today at (954) 739-4700.