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Show Notes
Today we’re talking about three things that a lot of people believe to be true about computers, but in fact they are not true.
Myth #1: Turning the computer off, then powering it up again, is a restart. FALSE
I always tell people, you need to restart your computer every day or two. This resets the uptime counter, refreshes the memory, just gives the whole thing a fresh start. And often when I tell them that, the response is, “Oh, I do that every night!” Meaning, they turn the computer off at night, and turn it back on the next morning. But doing that is not a restart. Intuitively, you’d think it would be a more THOROUGH restart, but the opposite is true. You need to click the Start button, then the power Icon, and then click on the word “Restart”.
Myth #2: Formatting wipes all the data off the hard drive. FALSE
If you have a portable drive, and you plug it in to your computer, you can look and see exactly what is on that drive. All the files and folders are there for you to look at. Then, if you do a right click on that drive letter and choose “Format”, you can wait a minute until it’s done, and if you look again, you won’t see any files or folders listed there now. They must be all gone, right? Nope. They are still there. Formatting just tells the computer that all of that space is now open for you to put new files and folders on there. So if you have sensitive data on a drive and you’re planning to dispose of it, don’t just format it and assume that data is gone.
Myth #3: If your computer is running too slowly, you must need to defrag. FALSE
This is something every computer tech has heard. A client walks in the door with their computer, and the complaint is that it is running very slowly. “I tried defragging it, but it didn’t seem to make any difference!” That is correct. Defragging will almost never make any difference, for two reasons. First, your hard drive would have to be extremely fragmented in order for defragmentation (the actual term) to make any difference. Second, your computer is already defragging on its own, on a regular schedule. It’s part of the default maintenance that’s already set up in Windows.
Did you believe any of these myths before reading this? Let me know what you think in the comments below!
The post 3 common computer myths first appeared on The Computer Tutor.