If you’re searching for potential ways of becoming more efficient at using laptops, either you are looking to advance your computer skills, or your good old laptop has started performing slowly. No matter what the reason is, it’s always good to learn new skills.
The article is your quick guide that tells you the possible ways to use your computer with more efficacy. Let’s learn about these tips and tricks.
Make Your Home Screen More Catchy
Think beyond the operating system’s logo or the sunset and sunrise images to make your laptop’s home screen compelling. Turn your display into something that hooks you and keeps you focused. Remember that you’re there to create and not to consume.
You can add a widget that keeps you up-to-date with current affairs and your surroundings. Why not add a clock, a calendar, and a news widget where you get sports and weather info?
Keep All Your Messages in One Single Place
If you don’t want to swipe through the screen the entire day or looking to be able to respond to the messages while working, bring all your messaging apps together on your Mac or Windows computer. It will make you more productive.
You can view all your texts and delete unnecessary ones in a single go. Learn how to remove messages from Mac to delete promotional messages and save space.
Declutter Your Desktop and Computer
With everything on your desktop (both physical and digital), you can easily be distracted from your work objectives. Make sure to remove everything from your work desk as well as the digital desktop. Organize stuff in a way that makes your tasks easier.
For example, put all the screenshots in a Screenshots folder, save all your Word files in an MS Word folder or project-wise, depending on your preferences.
Uninstall Unnecessary Apps and Erase App Data
Most of the time, we download apps to complete a specific task, and when the task completes, keeping those apps on the device makes no sense. So, identify all such apps and uninstall them completely from your computer.
When you remove apps from the computer, make sure to delete the app cache and associated files to make your device more efficient and productive.
Identify Resource-Eating Items
Most items you have stored on your hard drive are just sitting there, doing nothing more than consuming system resources. Identify the heavy lead apps that seem to consume more resources like storage, RAM, or CPU power, and delete them right away.
You can navigate to the Task Manager on a Windows computer or the Activity Monitor on your MacBook to detect which apps are resource hogs.
Learn Keyboard Shortcuts to Get Everything Quickly
If you, too, are among the thousands of users who feel it is annoying switching between keyboard and mouse, this tip is for you. Don’t waste your time doing things traditionally, as it requires effort, and you will feel bored after some time.
Harness the power of key combinations that you can do to accomplish any task quickly. Plus, you don’t have to move between the keyboard and the mouse.
Make Your Internet Browsing Faster
If you’re working from home, a student, or a freelancer, you must be spending most of your time browsing the internet. Right? But if the internet is slow, it seems frustrating to search on Google and then wait for another couple of seconds to get to the right webpage.
When you’re dealing with a slow browser, try clearing your cache, updating the browser, removing browser extensions, or upgrading the operating system.
Update OS, Apps, and Drivers Regularly
To get the most productivity from your computer or to use all the features efficiently, ensure you are using the latest version of the operating system. The features of the OS, apps, and drivers turn obsolete and make your system sluggish in due course.
Most manufacturers throw regular updates that your system installs automatically. You may also update the operating system and apps manually to ensure maximum performance.
Save Data to Cloud Drive
Keep in mind you have limited storage space on your laptop, which fills up faster than you usually expect. Even if you have a 1TB SSD installed on your computer, it will soar one day. No data limit is sufficient to accommodate your data storage needs.
That’s when Cloud Drives comes to the rescue. Windows users can sign in to Google Drive, and macOS users can use iCloud to save their files and gain all-time access to data.
Assign Passwords to Important Files
With security threats rising rapidly, protecting files stored on physical or Cloud media becomes a norm. Protect your data from security vulnerabilities and hacking attempts by assigning strong passwords composed of numbers, letters, and special characters.
For online accounts, ensure that you have two-step authentication in place. You are solely responsible for preventing your offline and online information from unauthorized access.
Learn to Manage Your Emails
When you are looking for potential ways to use your computer efficiently, how can you forget inboxes? Yes, emails are an important part of our day-to-day lives. Your inbox should be managed in a way that you don’t have to spend hours finding a specific message.
Only keep the emails that require quick action in your Inbox and put action pending emails in the Waiting Folder, for example. Also, create Labels and put all associated emails into them.
Backup Your Data Regularly
Last but not least, data backups are important. Whether you are using Windows or macOS, no system is prone to data loss. Make sure to back up your entire data at regular intervals so that you can restore important files and apps in the event of data loss.
While Cloud backups are efficient, you also have the option to store all your files on an external SSD.
So, these were some effective ways that enabled you to use your computer for better efficiency. When you follow these tips, you will notice a significant change in the way you explore the features and functions of your computer.
