I worked on a computer this week that had so many icons on the desktop that the top left corner was stacked with more than fifty icons…all right on top of each other. I’ve never see that before. In fact, I never conceived of having that many icons on the desktop, and as a result never wondered what would happen if you had enough to fill and overflow the grid that Windows uses to spread your icons out over the whole of your desktop. NOW I KNOW! Personally I like to keep a clean desktop so I usually make sure and move any files that are worth saving (and many that aren’t) to subdirectories in my documents folder or even to another drive that I keep in my machine to hide away things that I might never need again.
THE REAL REASON that the user brought that computer to me was that they were receiving a fan error and as a result the laptop would not boot. After a little research as to what might cause that error on that particular machine I decided to open the case and check it out. As it turns out there was a small sticker that had come loose from another internal component and had lodged itself into the fan. The sticker was providing just enough resistance to stop the fan from spinning. I removed the sticker and the fan fired right up again. Problem solved.
The user also asked me to make some recommendations, so while I had the case open, I noticed that they had an open RAM Slot, and were still using an traditional hard drive. I recommended another 8 Gig RAM Chip (to get them to 16 total, the maximum that is possible for that machine) and a Solid State Drive, for a total cost of about $100 with labor, including the sticker removal. Since that was far cheaper than a new laptop the user decided to go with it, and within a couple of days I was able to clone their drive and get them up and running with what feels like a brand new machine.
Computer Repairs and Upgrades don’t HAVE to cost a fortune. Most of the time, your computer can be faster with a few small adjustments. DO YOU HAVE AN OLD MACHINE THAT YOU THOUGHT WAS NO GOOD ANYMORE? If so I would love to take a look and see if we can breath some new life into it.