Helpful PC Hints

PCs & Laptops For Dummies

Here are some essential tips for working with your PC. Keeping your PC in good working order prolongs its life and prevents you from losing important data.

Always use your best posture while you compute. Don’t slouch! Elevate your wrists. Don’t tilt your head too far down.
Get a UPS for your PC. Plug the monitor, console, and external backup drive into the battery-backed-up sockets.
Properly turn off your PC; use the Windows Shutdown command.
You can connect and disconnect USB devices to and from the computer while the computer or the device is on.
To get to the Control Panel in Windows 10, press Win+X and choose Control Panel from the super-secret menu.
The best gift you can buy your PC is more memory.
Obtain an external hard drive and implement a backup regimen on your PC.
Remember to properly eject and safely remove any removable media in Windows; don’t just yank something out of your PC.
The key to understanding software is to know what a file is. The key to organizing files is to know what a folder is.

About This Article

About the book author:

Dan Gookin has been writing about technology for 20 years. He has contributed articles to numerous high-tech magazines and written more than 90 books about personal computing technology, many of them accurate.
He combines his love of writing with his interest in technology to create books that are informative and entertaining, but not boring. Having sold more than 14 million titles translated into more than 30 languages, Dan can attest that his method of crafting computer tomes does seem to work.
Perhaps Dan’s most famous title is the original DOS For Dummies, published in 1991. It became the world’s fastest-selling computer book, at one time moving more copies per week than the New York Times number-one best seller (although, because it’s a reference book, it could not be listed on the NYT best seller list). That book spawned the entire line of For Dummies books, which remains a publishing phenomenon to this day.
Dan’s most recent titles include PCs For Dummies, 9th Edition; Buying a Computer For Dummies, 2005 Edition; Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies; Dan Gookin’s Naked Windows XP; and Dan Gookin’s Naked Office. He publishes a free weekly computer newsletter, “Weekly Wambooli Salad,” and also maintains the vast and helpful Web site www.wambooli.com.