Show your partner some love: Clean your computer

Today is a day like no other. Firstly, it’s Valentine’s Day, a day to show those that we love, what they really mean to us. Secondly, and more importantly (in my opinion) it’s National Clean Out Your Computer Day!

What the…!? ?

I can imagine your confused/bemused face. You have to understand I love tech and I love clean tech.

National Clean Out Your Computer Day is really an American thing, but you know what, it just makes sense to me that as a leading IT support business, that we introduce it to the Great British public.

Created in the year 2000 by The Institute for Business Technology, they designated the second Monday of February “National Clean Out Your Computer Day” to encourage people to make time to organise their computer and remove the unwanted, you know what they say “an uncluttered mind, is a productive mind”.

Ok, you get it, so what should you do?

First thing’s first, open up your browser, head to your history and purge it. Now take the time to refill it with ‘nice’ websites, like holidays, flowers, cool gifts etc.

Now we move on to actually cleaning your computer.

Backup files

If you have lots of files or folders saved locally to your device, what would happen if one day your device failed?! ? Try to regularly moves files and folders to your OneDrive, SharePoint or other cloud based storage.

Remove unused programs

Unused programs take memory, and once you get low in memory everything starts to sl-o–w d—o—-w—-n! Just make sure to only uninstall programs that are not critical, if in doubt have a chat with your IT support team.

Clean your keyboard

Ever eaten lunch over your keyboard? Wondered where the crumbs all end up ?? That’s a pretty gross keyboard, but it can actually all build up and cause the keys to stick. So when you have some time, unplug from your device, prise off a few keys (don’t forget where the keys came from) and get cleaning, making sure to give it a good wipe down after.

Dusting

The build up of dust around device ventilation points can cause it to overheat, and create problems for your device. Give it a light dusting every now and then and you will be helping to prolong your device life.

Wipe your screen

Sneezed on a screen recently..? I’ll say no more! ?

Updates and patches

Now one from our Cybersecurity muscle! Take the time to update and apply patches to your computer, this ensure that any security updates are applied protecting you from the cybercriminals.

So this Valentine’s Day, don’t go murdering flowers or handing over obesity squares (chocolate) and passing it off as a gift, just make sure that you both have extremely clean computers. It will do wonders for your relationship.

Some fun facts…

• The first computer weighed more than 27 tons and took up 1,800 square feet.
• The first computer programmer was a woman.
• More than 80% of daily emails in the USA are spam.
• The first gigabyte cost $40,000.
• About 6,000 new viruses are released each month.
• If a computer was as powerful as the human brain, it would do 38 thousand trillion operations per second and hold 3,580 terabytes of memory.
• The password for the computer controls of nuclear-tipped missiles of the U.S was 00000000 for eight years.
• Till 2013, Netflix needed about 3.14 PB of hard drive space for its movies, which is about 3.3 million gigabytes.
• The first 1GB hard disk drive weighed about 550 pounds.
• Your keyboard may contain more germs than your toilet seat, says a study. 4 out of 33 keyboards were tested as potential health hazards, and one of them had five times higher germs than a toilet seat.

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